Re: Brian Kernighan, maybe I'm not worthy, maybe I'm scum


"spinoza1111" <spinoza1111@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
On Dec 31, 2:15 am, "Malcolm McLean" <regniz...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > "Richard Heathfield" <r...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

As a teacher in China, I advise you that "Chinaman" to refer to a
Chinese person is racist, since it originated in America in the 19th
century, where Chinese men were allowed into California commencing in
the Gold Rush and the construction of the transcontinental railroad as
near slave labor, and not permitted to bring their families, and the
word for a Chinese person was "Chinaman".

If you use a euphemism, doesn't that betray your real attitude to you students?

what they look like, to an English person all Chinese characters look >>pretty similar.

Just like all dem flesh and blood Chinese characters, with their
slanty eyes? Har. Chinese characters are of course dramatically
different. They have to be written in a specific way and precisely:
for example, the relative width of the 2 horizontal bars in the
Chinese character for Tian (heaven) have to be correct.

Yup. Their genetic diversity is much lower than other human populations. I frequently mix up one with another, which is a bit embarrassing.

This is what Palestinian intellectual Edward Said called Orientalism:
the unconscious presumption that the default point of view is Western.
FYI, the PURPOSE of a symbolic mechanism is to support the source, not
the margins, and the West is from the Chinese point of view the
barbarian margin.

Computers are our toys, not theirs. A Chinese-invented information processing technology probably wouldn't work with discrete bits and bytes, for instance. It's a profoundly Western way of looking at information.

The representation of which you speak is useful, Mister Dead Inventor
of the Containership, but only from an Orientalist point of view. It
is furthermore based on a truly neutral (which is to say numerical)
representation: unicode. Your friend Zhong Fu has the more important
right, which is to generate the bit mapped Chinese characters with a
keyboard that makes this easy for him. It's your responsibility to be
smart enough, when you get email from him, to switch to HTML and
numerics.

Zhong Fu certainly want to be able to use a computer in Chinese. One's natural first thought would be to provide a 32-bit character set, encoding every Chinese character. However actually this isn't such a good idea. The Chinese glyph set is open (I believe, I don't speak the language). So the set would have to be updated every time someone coins a new word.

Obviously it is much easier to speak of my own needs rather than Zhong Fu's.

My students struggle 24/7 to master two cultures. Do them the courtesy
of not calling them Chinamen, and not forcing them to use a form of
machine language.

Part of my job is, indeed, to force Chinese students to use a form of machine language. The non-programming Chinese user should maybe be protected from this, but the budding IT professional should not be. That's why they come to Britain to study rather than staying in China.

--
Free games and programming goodies.
http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~bgy1mm

.

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