Re: Universal iconic language - (was - Sanskrit as computer programming language)?

From: Alex Shinn (foof_at_synthcode.com)
Date: 07/08/04 

Date: Thu, 08 Jul 2004 12:21:26 +0900

At Thu, 08 Jul 2004 00:29:13 GMT, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>
> Dennis wrote:
>
> > Please provide some examples of the superiorities that you recognize.
>
> What history shows is that the simpler a writing system is, the
> greater the literacy rate societies that use it can achieve and
> the earlier the age of proper literacy can be.

Japan has arguably the most complicated writing system in the world,
using Chinese characters, two different syllabaries, plus the Latin
alphabet. Though it uses fewer characters than the Chinese (normal use
2000 vs 3000-5000 for Chinese), characters can have multiple readings
(usually 2) and comprise multiple syllables, unlike Chinese which is
consistently one reading, one syllable per character. Yet Japan has a
99% literacy rate, vs. 97% for the United States.

> That's a pretty powerful benefit in and of itself, in terms of
> education; you get to spend time on other things besides memorizing
> huge tables of glyphs and practicing them.

And the average American continues to study spelling and obscure SAT
words throughout high-school. Humans are also very good at memorizing
things - for the Japanese, apparently memorizing all readings and
special cases for 2000 characters isn't enough and they spend most of
their schooling memorizing long lists of facts like historic dates.

> Also, the history of heiroglyph and ideogram-using cultures
> tends toward stagnation by comparison to alphabet-using
> cultures. There are thousands of things that affect the
> rate of progress or, sadly, sometimes regress, in a culture,
> but alphabets, aside from being easier to learn earlier in
> life, allow words for new concepts to be formed without
> requiring the sensory memorization for a new heiroglyph,
> and don't require a stable/inflexible map of associations
> between concepts as do ideograms.

Chinese characters are not inflexible, and you can create new words and
compound words with them (as well as the equivalent of acronyms) just as
you can in other languages. I find that compound words in Japanese are
in many cases more natural than the English equivalents, or can be
constructed where in English you would need to use a longer phrase.
It's true that it would be difficult to write something like
"Jabberwocky" in Chinese or Japanese, but that is an art form, and not
needed to communicate new ideas.

I was watching Japanese TV last night and they had a program where 5
people were seated in a row and, given a question, had to each spell one
character of a 5 character word or phrase to build a complete answer
when read together. One question was "how do you write the English word
'chair' in Latin letters?", and together they spelled out something like
"chere." Another question was "how do you translate NASA into
Japanese?" They got this wrong too, but were closer to the right
answer, and I found it interesting to see that the Japanese equivalent
was only 1 character longer than the English abbreviation, yet was not
an abbreviation and you could exactly understand what it meant from
reading it. Meanwhile I had to struggle to remember what NASA stood for
in English; I feel barraged by too many meaningless acronyms in the
computer age.

> So, it's my personal opinion (and apparently McLuhan's too)
> that heiroglyphic and/or ideographic writing systems tend to
> foster a resistance to change. It could be one factor among
> many; it could even be a coincidence. But coincidence doesn't
> seem likely, and history as far as I know it doesn't offer
> counterexamples to the idea.

There are only two languages still using ideographic writing systems,
and "resistance to change" is a rather vague concept (both countries are
going through a lot of change), so without any clear arguments for cause
and effect I'd have to consider that coincidence. 

-- 
Alex

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