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China has the proper idea for a writing system this entire time.

• paulmd 4y ago
  if you view meme culture as a trend towards increased symbol density in linguistic communication due to their ability to convey emotions, overtones, implications, and other nuance ("shaka, when the walls fell") then the increased symbol space of chinese/japanese/korean characters looks interesting. conversely it's certainly been an obvious disadvantage (posed a lot of problems and imposed a lot of awkward workarounds) for mechanical/electronic communication - now you have to enter the characters too, and you have to express that larger number of characters efficiently. In practice, a lot of electronic communication is just simplified to ASCII because that's the set that works universally. Someone used the example of ess-tset being transliterated as "ss" in german, dunno if chinese uses anything similar, but it wouldn't surprise me, obviously Japanese has romaji too. but at a human-interface level, fundamentally there is a limit to how many symbols people can absorb. Even with latin characters, people at best will sight-read whole words to increase symbol rate, but, the natural evolution is to use 1 character to represent 1 symbol/word, that's the highest possible rate at which humans can absorb symbols for a written system. And in turn you could in principle absorb a "word of symbols", which is a sentence, similar to how western readers can sight-read a word of our 1-character glyphs. by "increasing the dimensionality" of the symbol, you increase the effective symbol rate, similar to how memes use subtext/etc to convey more nuance than a pure text can by itself.