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While countries with traditional ideograph-based languages (China, Japan, etc) are slowly turning to the alphabet to simplify their written language, we are rei

While countries with traditional ideograph-based languages (China, Japan, etc) are slowly turning to the alphabet to simplify their written language, we are reinventing ideographs, poorly and politically. Quite fascinating, but also incredibly sad.

FabHK 8y ago
No. A) Emojis are better ideographs than CJK characters, not poorer ones. This is a horse, recognisably: [imagine the horse emoji here... :-) ]. This not so much in my view: 馬. B) Nobody is proposing to replace all words with hackneyed emojis. (“Although” sort of sounds like “old owl”, so let’s replace it by an owl with gray hair, maybe sitting on top of a mouth so we can disambiguate it from a reference to an owl.) C) The notion that CJK characters represent ideas, not words & sounds, (embedded in the term “ideograph”) has been extensively criticised, eg by John DeFrancis in his The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_and_Fantasy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_a...
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  Chinese characters pretty unambiguously represent syllables and not meanings. [1] Japanese characters are the other way around. They have semantics, but the only way to know the intended pronunciation is to look at the specific sentence in which one is being used. It's fair to say that a kanji in isolation doesn't have a pronunciation. This is the reason the Japanese weren't able to get by with just the characters -- Japanese text makes liberal use of kana to make up for the fact that kanji are, like emoji, all semantics and no pronunciation or syntax. [1] Well, they do represent meaning too, much as English spelling does, but that's incidental to the way they function.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Egyptian hieroglyph for "horse": https://en.wikipedia.org/w/extensions/wikihiero/img/hiero_E6.png https://en.wikipedia.org/w/extensions/wikihiero/img/hiero_E6...
mirimir 8y ago
Actually, it's more like hieroglyphics.[0] 0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardiner's_sign_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardiner's_sign_list Edit: And there are tons of Unicode characters.[1] 1) https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U13000.pdf https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U13000.pdf

FabHK 8y ago

No. A) Emojis are better ideographs than CJK characters, not poorer ones. This is a horse, recognisably: [imagine the horse emoji here... :-) ]. This not so much in my view: 馬. B) Nobody is proposing to replace all words with hackneyed emojis. (“Although” sort of sounds like “old owl”, so let’s replace it by an owl with gray hair, maybe sitting on top of a mouth so we can disambiguate it from a reference to an owl.) C) The notion that CJK characters represent ideas, not words & sounds, (embedded in the term “ideograph”) has been extensively criticised, eg by John DeFrancis in his The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_and_Fantasy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_a...

thaumasiotes 8y ago
Chinese characters pretty unambiguously represent syllables and not meanings. [1] Japanese characters are the other way around. They have semantics, but the only way to know the intended pronunciation is to look at the specific sentence in which one is being used. It's fair to say that a kanji in isolation doesn't have a pronunciation. This is the reason the Japanese weren't able to get by with just the characters -- Japanese text makes liberal use of kana to make up for the fact that kanji are, like emoji, all semantics and no pronunciation or syntax. [1] Well, they do represent meaning too, much as English spelling does, but that's incidental to the way they function.
mirimir 8y ago
Egyptian hieroglyph for "horse": https://en.wikipedia.org/w/extensions/wikihiero/img/hiero_E6.png https://en.wikipedia.org/w/extensions/wikihiero/img/hiero_E6...

mirimir 8y ago

Actually, it's more like hieroglyphics.[0] 0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardiner's_sign_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardiner's_sign_list Edit: And there are tons of Unicode characters.[1] 1) https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U13000.pdf https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U13000.pdf