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Chinese is different, regarding homographs. Written English forces a lot of disambiguation of a purely abstract kind (English homograph collisions don't usually

Chinese is different, regarding homographs. Written English forces a lot of disambiguation of a purely abstract kind (English homograph collisions don't usually reflect associations, just random collisions) else you can't cope with the homographs. Ideogram collisions or overlaps are far more meaningful, generally non-co-incidental. (Terrific for poetry.) Examining all this, some while ago, a Chinese professional philosopher and I concluded that this had indeed had some real influence on the two cultures and thinking. This point isn't about visualization per se, but instead the fact that ideograms combine concepts, not sounds. Thanks to its extreme borrowing and therefore an abundance of synonyms, English is no doubt the most extreme example of a language with random homonym and homograph collisions, forcing both listener and reader to make constant choices between abstract (unassociated) options. That's not generally how the human mind works, brains are association engines. So it's a good bet that the fact that English is the language of science and technology (for now) is not entirely coincidental. This is no bar to progress for China today, however, to the extent that the hànzì alphabet is adopted for text.

erispoe 10y ago
How did you conclude this? Through experimentation or reasoning?
- Nomentatus 10y ago
  I don't think "good bets" are conclusions. The professor and I were comparing different thinking patterns. He had the most exemplars having moved to North American within a year or two of the conversation.
distances 10y ago
> So it's a good bet that the fact that English is the language of science and technology (for now) is not entirely coincidental. I have to disagree on this. For me it seems that the world politics was the major, if not only, reason why English took over French and German in these fields (too).
- Nomentatus 10y ago
  I can't interpret this. Do you mean the supremacy of the english navy due to the improvements in iron forging that gave the english iron cannons first around the time of the Spanish Armada? That world politics? It's true that Germany had better rates of literacy 500 years ago.
  - wenc 10y ago
    No, it is because the British Empire spanned a quarter of the globe and the Americans won World War II. No other language has had the advantage of being the language of two world superpowers with such vast geopolitical influence spanning over 200 years and huge expanses of the globe. French was the language of international diplomacy, but the French language never had the unparalleled reach that English had (and still has to this day). In terms of technology, the Industrial Revolution and American scientific achievements were important drivers too. German was the language of science, but when the vast number of new findings are published in English (due to the sheer volume of American/British scientific output), its decline was inevitable.
    - Nomentatus 10y ago
      Those iron cannons, together with a wealth of Elizabethan technical innovations, are a VERY large reason why Britain spanned the globe. The advantage of world-dominance didn't precede innovation, it resulted from it. Better weapons, better tactics, better hull designs for ships, better mining techniques and on and on and on. The U.S. won WWII with no small amount of accumulated Western technology and technological advance. What WWII did do was allow the US (and Russia, but not Britain) to simply seize every German patent in existence without compensation, afterward. If you research Germany technological history you might have a chance to overturn my hypothesis. But the industrial revolution didn't begin there. In any case you'd have to do a lot more homework than you have so far. Japan was a latecomer, and can't count as a counterexample. English as the primary language of technology and science long predates WWII. The exception might be chemistry (German.)
yongjik 10y ago
> So it's a good bet that the fact that English is the language of science and technology (for now) is not entirely coincidental. Unless it was the intricacy of English spelling that finally drove Hitler over the edge, resulting in the US rising as the sole superpower while France and Germany crashed and burned, I'm not sure how they could be possible related.
- Nomentatus 10y ago
  Repairing a clock, or creating a weaving machine requires thought with an underlying simplicity (and definitiveness) to its logic - you have to take simple facts and relationships (without rich associations) that can piled on top of each other and yield precise calculations. Poetry is a great preparation for many things, but probably not clock design or repair. Math, logic, mechanics - what's so different about these tasks is that they're simple-to-complex. But because our minds are association-machines, they're all hard for us. Chess gets you closer to that sort of thinking than Go does (it's a more intuitive game.) However Chinese chess has a long history and isn't much different than Western chess, so chess hasn't been a Western advantage. And a language with an alphabet and tons of homonyms strips away many of the rich associations present, say, in the written Chinese language. I'm going to guess you haven't experienced and can't imagine the difference, or perhaps the notion that the Chinese way might be richer or superior in any respect. Compare many of the mind-bending "reasonings" of Medieval thinkers from a time when Latin was the medium of scholarship. So many of these, which were taken very seriously at the time, are just stupifying to moderns - because the arguments are so easily taken over by coincidental associations which to a modern person have no logical importance at all, of any kind. Latin borrowed, but never as freely as English did, and by Medieval times was a pared-down, rationalized version of Ancient Latin. No forest of homographs. Another pretty well-known hypothesis holds that english common law, which in contrast with so many other top-down legal traditions, necessitated the logical reconciliation of decision across many circumstances, etc, over hundreds of years, reinforced the mechanical bent of mind. I guess you'd find it plumb crazy too.

erispoe 10y ago

How did you conclude this? Through experimentation or reasoning?

Nomentatus 10y ago
I don't think "good bets" are conclusions. The professor and I were comparing different thinking patterns. He had the most exemplars having moved to North American within a year or two of the conversation.

distances 10y ago

> So it's a good bet that the fact that English is the language of science and technology (for now) is not entirely coincidental. I have to disagree on this. For me it seems that the world politics was the major, if not only, reason why English took over French and German in these fields (too).

Nomentatus 10y ago
I can't interpret this. Do you mean the supremacy of the english navy due to the improvements in iron forging that gave the english iron cannons first around the time of the Spanish Armada? That world politics? It's true that Germany had better rates of literacy 500 years ago.
- wenc 10y ago
  No, it is because the British Empire spanned a quarter of the globe and the Americans won World War II. No other language has had the advantage of being the language of two world superpowers with such vast geopolitical influence spanning over 200 years and huge expanses of the globe. French was the language of international diplomacy, but the French language never had the unparalleled reach that English had (and still has to this day). In terms of technology, the Industrial Revolution and American scientific achievements were important drivers too. German was the language of science, but when the vast number of new findings are published in English (due to the sheer volume of American/British scientific output), its decline was inevitable.
  - Nomentatus 10y ago
    Those iron cannons, together with a wealth of Elizabethan technical innovations, are a VERY large reason why Britain spanned the globe. The advantage of world-dominance didn't precede innovation, it resulted from it. Better weapons, better tactics, better hull designs for ships, better mining techniques and on and on and on. The U.S. won WWII with no small amount of accumulated Western technology and technological advance. What WWII did do was allow the US (and Russia, but not Britain) to simply seize every German patent in existence without compensation, afterward. If you research Germany technological history you might have a chance to overturn my hypothesis. But the industrial revolution didn't begin there. In any case you'd have to do a lot more homework than you have so far. Japan was a latecomer, and can't count as a counterexample. English as the primary language of technology and science long predates WWII. The exception might be chemistry (German.)

yongjik 10y ago

> So it's a good bet that the fact that English is the language of science and technology (for now) is not entirely coincidental. Unless it was the intricacy of English spelling that finally drove Hitler over the edge, resulting in the US rising as the sole superpower while France and Germany crashed and burned, I'm not sure how they could be possible related.

Nomentatus 10y ago
Repairing a clock, or creating a weaving machine requires thought with an underlying simplicity (and definitiveness) to its logic - you have to take simple facts and relationships (without rich associations) that can piled on top of each other and yield precise calculations. Poetry is a great preparation for many things, but probably not clock design or repair. Math, logic, mechanics - what's so different about these tasks is that they're simple-to-complex. But because our minds are association-machines, they're all hard for us. Chess gets you closer to that sort of thinking than Go does (it's a more intuitive game.) However Chinese chess has a long history and isn't much different than Western chess, so chess hasn't been a Western advantage. And a language with an alphabet and tons of homonyms strips away many of the rich associations present, say, in the written Chinese language. I'm going to guess you haven't experienced and can't imagine the difference, or perhaps the notion that the Chinese way might be richer or superior in any respect. Compare many of the mind-bending "reasonings" of Medieval thinkers from a time when Latin was the medium of scholarship. So many of these, which were taken very seriously at the time, are just stupifying to moderns - because the arguments are so easily taken over by coincidental associations which to a modern person have no logical importance at all, of any kind. Latin borrowed, but never as freely as English did, and by Medieval times was a pared-down, rationalized version of Ancient Latin. No forest of homographs. Another pretty well-known hypothesis holds that english common law, which in contrast with so many other top-down legal traditions, necessitated the logical reconciliation of decision across many circumstances, etc, over hundreds of years, reinforced the mechanical bent of mind. I guess you'd find it plumb crazy too.