6 ms·

I suspect only needing to learn a dozen alphanumeric characters vs hundreds/thousands of unique characters also helped literacy

WalterBright 4y ago
We're going back to hundreds/thousands of unique characters. See the growth of icons and emojis, and Unicode's rush to invent endless new "characters".
- Mordisquitos 4y ago
  Lucky our printing technology has moved past moveable type and mechanical typesetting in recent years. My printer is not that new and can already print all extended Latin characters and maybe even some emojis.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    From time to time, people ask for D to support Unicode operator code points. I decided it wasn't a good idea, as it makes code more difficult to type in, and there's the problem of text processing programs' (like editors, printers, etc.) support for non-ASCII being rather unpredictable. > maybe even some I.e. unreliable :-/
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    Change is not progress. It took millennia for us to go from emojis to characters and the few societies that did ended up dominating the world because of the increases in efficiency. Now we're heading in the other direction because literacy is too hard.
- funcDropShadow 4y ago
  Unicode is primarily concerned with standardizing existing characters in the majority of the language systems of the world. The big exception are emojis and a small number of usefull icons, the power button icon comes to mind. Its story of addition to unicoe was shared on Hacker News some years ago. As far as I know the only area of invention and growth are emojis.
- bregma 4y ago
  If this were true, the first page of every book would consist of nothing but special glyphs for product placement.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  Obviously we're not. Icons and emoji aren't characters -- you don't need them to write words and their meanings are relatively self-evident as opposed to letters where you have to learn how to pronounce an otherwise mostly arbitrary squiggle. And aside from emoji (which is demand-driven), Unicode isn't inventing anything, it's codifying things that already exist.
  - thematrixturtle 4y ago
    Here are the Chinese characters for concave and convex: 凹凸 Care to take a stab at the difference between these and emoji?
    - elurg 4y ago
      Very few Chinese characters are pictograms and even those are extremely stylized. The vast majority are complex compounds of smaller radicals. They are nothing like emoji.
      - thematrixturtle 4y ago
        No, they're both on the same continuum. The original Chinese characters were emoji, which literally means "picture characters" in Japanese, and emoji today are already evolving beyond their original pictorial meanings -- for example, an eggplant isn't just an eggplant anymore.
        crazygringo 4y ago
        > The original Chinese characters were emoji This is one of the most absurd things I have ever read, but in an extremely funny way! I think you're trying to make the argument that both Chinese characters and emoji are pictographs. Yes, a few Chinese characters originated as pictographs (a tiny minority of them), and emoji are one form of pictograph, but that... doesn't make Chinese characters emoji, not even "the original ones". It doesn't even put them on the same "continuum" -- one is stroke-based logograms that represent individual syllables of words, the other is pure artistic illustration. You seem to be trying to redefine the word "emoji" into something it's not, your own idiosyncratic personal definition. But that's not how words work.
sanxiyn 4y ago
More important was writing in vernacular. Learning a writing system is comparatively easier than learning a new language. For a long time people needed to learn a new language to write.
avyeed_desa 4y ago
I don't really believe that, as using chinese characters would lead to a much higher information density compared to using alphabet, which in turn would've tuned out to make books much lighter and being able to print more pages on one sheet, compared to two with the same informational value in western languages.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  Really? I once saw an old YouTube video that claimed that some hanzi are super obscure and even native Chinese have to look them up sometimes when wanting to use them, and gave the example of "sneeze". I asked my Shanghai born coworker, who led the local Chinese friendship society, about this, and he furrowed his brow and said "...shit, actually, yeah, I'd need to look that up myself." This is merely one anecdote, of course, There's information density, but there's also information accessibility. And the trick is finding the balance between the two. Having 8000 characters (in simplified Chinese) may be information dense, but how accessible is that information? E.g., a typical Chinese university graduate will know, on average, 3 -4K of them, and no doubt ones that are unused will atrophy over the years. The balance between density and accessibility is always ongoing. E.g., I find reading presentation slides with a transcript far more information dense than watching a video of that presentation, but some people find it far more accessible in video form. And then for complex discussions, I find video calls far more information dense than Slack message or email exchanges.
  - DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
    Recognizing and writing characters are different skills. Chinese people typically recognize far more characters than they can write (this has become much more severe in the electronics age, because most people input text using the pinyin Romanization, so they don't write by hand any more). In addition, if you're reading a text and you come across an uncommon character, you can often figure it out, both from context and by recognizing elements in the character (which give hints about the pronunciation and meaning).
antupis 4y ago
There was also ideologial push to increase literacy from religious movements after reformation (Luther and Jesuit etc) which did not happen at China.
- jhbadger 4y ago
  I think it was more the other direction. Protestantism was based on the idea that people should read the Bible themselves rather than have priests interpret it for them as had been traditionally done. This was impractical before printing because hand-copied books were so expensive. Cheap printed books led to the possibility of these movements being successful.
  - joshuacc 4y ago
    It goes both directions. Without the printing press, the rise of mass religious movements prioritizing literacy would not have been possible. But once the printing press was there, the religious movements pushed literacy forward faster than it would have gone without them.
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  The Communists came pretty close to dumping characters in favor of Latin script (pinyin). And this actually happened in Vietnam, although we have the French to thank/blame for that.
brazzy 4y ago
In really though, literacy in Europe before the arrival of the printing press was lower than in China.
- pixodaros 4y ago
  Another common fallacy in economic historians / "rise of the west" research is to compare the most developed parts of Europe (after 1700, typically the Low Countries and England) with 'all of China.' By doing this, they exclude the poorer parts of Europe and include the poorer parts of China to give the impression that "the great divergence" (sic) was early and foreordained

WalterBright 4y ago

We're going back to hundreds/thousands of unique characters. See the growth of icons and emojis, and Unicode's rush to invent endless new "characters".

Mordisquitos 4y ago
Lucky our printing technology has moved past moveable type and mechanical typesetting in recent years. My printer is not that new and can already print all extended Latin characters and maybe even some emojis.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  From time to time, people ask for D to support Unicode operator code points. I decided it wasn't a good idea, as it makes code more difficult to type in, and there's the problem of text processing programs' (like editors, printers, etc.) support for non-ASCII being rather unpredictable. > maybe even some I.e. unreliable :-/
- thrown_22 4y ago
  Change is not progress. It took millennia for us to go from emojis to characters and the few societies that did ended up dominating the world because of the increases in efficiency. Now we're heading in the other direction because literacy is too hard.
funcDropShadow 4y ago
Unicode is primarily concerned with standardizing existing characters in the majority of the language systems of the world. The big exception are emojis and a small number of usefull icons, the power button icon comes to mind. Its story of addition to unicoe was shared on Hacker News some years ago. As far as I know the only area of invention and growth are emojis.
bregma 4y ago
If this were true, the first page of every book would consist of nothing but special glyphs for product placement.
crazygringo 4y ago
Obviously we're not. Icons and emoji aren't characters -- you don't need them to write words and their meanings are relatively self-evident as opposed to letters where you have to learn how to pronounce an otherwise mostly arbitrary squiggle. And aside from emoji (which is demand-driven), Unicode isn't inventing anything, it's codifying things that already exist.
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  Here are the Chinese characters for concave and convex: 凹凸 Care to take a stab at the difference between these and emoji?
  - elurg 4y ago
    Very few Chinese characters are pictograms and even those are extremely stylized. The vast majority are complex compounds of smaller radicals. They are nothing like emoji.
    - thematrixturtle 4y ago
      No, they're both on the same continuum. The original Chinese characters were emoji, which literally means "picture characters" in Japanese, and emoji today are already evolving beyond their original pictorial meanings -- for example, an eggplant isn't just an eggplant anymore.
      - crazygringo 4y ago
        > The original Chinese characters were emoji This is one of the most absurd things I have ever read, but in an extremely funny way! I think you're trying to make the argument that both Chinese characters and emoji are pictographs. Yes, a few Chinese characters originated as pictographs (a tiny minority of them), and emoji are one form of pictograph, but that... doesn't make Chinese characters emoji, not even "the original ones". It doesn't even put them on the same "continuum" -- one is stroke-based logograms that represent individual syllables of words, the other is pure artistic illustration. You seem to be trying to redefine the word "emoji" into something it's not, your own idiosyncratic personal definition. But that's not how words work.

sanxiyn 4y ago

More important was writing in vernacular. Learning a writing system is comparatively easier than learning a new language. For a long time people needed to learn a new language to write.

avyeed_desa 4y ago

I don't really believe that, as using chinese characters would lead to a much higher information density compared to using alphabet, which in turn would've tuned out to make books much lighter and being able to print more pages on one sheet, compared to two with the same informational value in western languages.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
EdwardDiego 4y ago
Really? I once saw an old YouTube video that claimed that some hanzi are super obscure and even native Chinese have to look them up sometimes when wanting to use them, and gave the example of "sneeze". I asked my Shanghai born coworker, who led the local Chinese friendship society, about this, and he furrowed his brow and said "...shit, actually, yeah, I'd need to look that up myself." This is merely one anecdote, of course, There's information density, but there's also information accessibility. And the trick is finding the balance between the two. Having 8000 characters (in simplified Chinese) may be information dense, but how accessible is that information? E.g., a typical Chinese university graduate will know, on average, 3 -4K of them, and no doubt ones that are unused will atrophy over the years. The balance between density and accessibility is always ongoing. E.g., I find reading presentation slides with a transcript far more information dense than watching a video of that presentation, but some people find it far more accessible in video form. And then for complex discussions, I find video calls far more information dense than Slack message or email exchanges.
- DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
  Recognizing and writing characters are different skills. Chinese people typically recognize far more characters than they can write (this has become much more severe in the electronics age, because most people input text using the pinyin Romanization, so they don't write by hand any more). In addition, if you're reading a text and you come across an uncommon character, you can often figure it out, both from context and by recognizing elements in the character (which give hints about the pronunciation and meaning).

antupis 4y ago

There was also ideologial push to increase literacy from religious movements after reformation (Luther and Jesuit etc) which did not happen at China.

jhbadger 4y ago
I think it was more the other direction. Protestantism was based on the idea that people should read the Bible themselves rather than have priests interpret it for them as had been traditionally done. This was impractical before printing because hand-copied books were so expensive. Cheap printed books led to the possibility of these movements being successful.
- joshuacc 4y ago
  It goes both directions. Without the printing press, the rise of mass religious movements prioritizing literacy would not have been possible. But once the printing press was there, the religious movements pushed literacy forward faster than it would have gone without them.
thematrixturtle 4y ago
The Communists came pretty close to dumping characters in favor of Latin script (pinyin). And this actually happened in Vietnam, although we have the French to thank/blame for that.

brazzy 4y ago

In really though, literacy in Europe before the arrival of the printing press was lower than in China.

pixodaros 4y ago
Another common fallacy in economic historians / "rise of the west" research is to compare the most developed parts of Europe (after 1700, typically the Low Countries and England) with 'all of China.' By doing this, they exclude the poorer parts of Europe and include the poorer parts of China to give the impression that "the great divergence" (sic) was early and foreordained