On Sunday 30 August 2009 02:20:47 John Machin wrote:
> On Aug 30, 8:46 am, r <rt8...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Take for instance the Chinese language with it's thousands of
> > characters and BS, it's more of an art than a language. Why do we
> > need such complicated languages in this day and time. Many languages
> > have been perfected, (although not perfect) far beyond that of Chinese
> > language.
>
> The Chinese language is more widely spoken than English, is quite
> capable of expression in ASCII ("r tongzhi shi sha gua") and doesn't
> have those pesky it's/its problems.
>
> > The A-Z char set is flawless!
>
> ... for expressing the sounds of a very limited number of languages,
> and English is *NOT* one of those.
I suspect that the alphabet is not ideal for representing the sounds of _any_
language, and I would look for my proof in the plethora of things that we use
when writing, other than the bare A-Z. - Punctuation, diacritics...
But what really started me thinking, after reading this post of John's, read
with Dennis'. - on the dissimilarity of the spoken and written Chinese - was
the basic dichotomy of the two systems - a symbol for a sound vs a symbol for
a word or an idea.
I know that when I read, I do not actually read the characters, I recognize
words, and only fall back to messing with characters when I hit something
unfamiliar.
So It would seem to me that r's "utopia" could sooner be realized if the
former system were abandoned in favour of the latter. - and Horrors! The
language of choice would not be English!
Not that I agree that it would be a Utopia, whatever the language - more like
a nightmare of Orwellian proportions - because the language you get taught
first, moulds the way you think. And I know from personal experience that
there are concepts that can be succinctly expressed in one language, that
takes a lot of wordy handwaving to get across in another. So diversity would
be less, creativity would suffer due to lack of cross pollination, and
progress would slow or stop.
- Hendrik
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