

If English was written like Chinese - kkim
http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

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gibsonf1
I'm a true believer in the dis-value of pictograms representing words. I lived
in Japan for about 1.5 years, and was amazed that you need to memorize at
least 6000 kanji to be able to read the newspaper well. I was able to speak
and answer the phone after about 6 months and learned their two phonetic
alphabets (1 for Japanese words, and one identical in meaning but not in look
for 'foreign' words. But the kanji were overwhelming.)

My theory is that all of this memorization has a cost, and I think it is no
accident that languages requiring so much memory expense tend to have users
less able to innovate and integrate ideas given the mental overhead required.
(I was in Japan because, for those of you who have not visited, Japan has some
of the ugliest urban environments imaginable and they need help
architecturally. Ancient Japanese architecture from the Imperial days is
beautiful, but modern work tends to be completely non-integrated and non-
harmonious with a few notable exceptions.)

~~~
iamwil
I'd say be careful of native bias. Usually, native speakers of a language
think that their own language is easier than others--especially if they grew
up with it. Each language has strengths and weaknesses.

English has its share of headaches, but you don't notice them as often if
you're a native speaker. Pronunciation is a big headache. How do you know that
you pronounce the "t" in "skillet", but not in "fillet"? You memorize it. How
about "through" and "though"? You memorize it. Sure, there are standard
pronunciation rules in English, but because there are lots of borrowed words
from other languages in English, you end up with lots of exceptions--that you
have to memorize. I went for a long time calling "fajitas", a fah-gee-tuhz
instead of a fah-hee-tuhz.

The fact that we have a National Spelling Bee in the US and Britain only
attests to how difficult it is to pair up the spelling of a word to its
pronunciation. Other languages don't have this. In French, they have grammar
bees for kids. Chinese speaking kids join dictionary look-up bees.

Verb tense is something that needs memorization in English as well. Verb tense
changes by pronoun, by present/past/future, and by active/passive. They're
just something you have to memorize. In Chinese, there is no verb tense. So
that's one less thing to memorize.

Korean has a pretty simple alphabet, and it's easy to pronounce too. So by
your argument, Koreans should be able to innovate a lot better than the
Chinese and Japanese. While I don't have any studies to point to, I kinda
doubt that's the case, because there are lots of other factors to innovation
besides language, and we don't know which has more weight--we can't run a SVD
on it. Therefore, I think it's quite a leap to go from native language to
correlation with innovation.

If you said something to the effect of language on speed of education, then
you might have something. But innovation...I'm very skeptical.

~~~
gibsonf1
I wouldn't call it native bias, but it may be an error of adjacency instead of
causality. While living in Japan (in the early 90's) it was very common to
hear from Japanese that their mode of operation was to copy and then improve
on the copy rather than to make any great new discoveries. Also, at the time I
was there, the educational system enforced strict conformity - common saying
"if you see a nail sticking out, you hammer it down."

In any case, I was there as an architect, and I was amazed at how the building
designs there, which were typically very strange attempts at copying other
styles, were horribly integrated. Sure, each part of the building was executed
beautifully, but the whole was horrible. I was among many foreign architects
broght in to improve on the local design talent there. This is primarily where
my observation of lack of integrative ability/innovation comes form - the
built forms .

For the kanji discussion, even though there are many idiosyncracies about
pronunciation in spelling for English and other languages, you can get pretty
far phonetically. With Japanese/Chinese, you can't get far at all without
learning so many separate images (except for the few words using phonetic
alphabets.)

As far as innovation, Toyota has revolutionized business processes with their
lean system, but their car designs (the look) when they are good, are most
likely done out of country. (Many car design exteriors come out of California,
including the look of the Porsche Cayman and Boxter, etc)

I'm seeing a pattern in my post here: maybe the memorization of all those
images makes it more difficult (but certainly not impossible of course) for
the language user to create visually integrative designs?

~~~
qaexl
Or maybe in the rush to imitate the Western styles, the Japanese at the time
discarded their traditional arts. Until they gained experience in that new
style, they could hardly create visually integrative designs. They obviously
were able to create visually integrative designs when they weren't trying to
imitate someone else.

I don't think the use of a visual language impairs that part of the mind as
much as you seem to think it does.

~~~
gibsonf1
What is interesting is that it seems that there was a person or persons who
developed the traditional Japanese style including modularity, scale
proportional to humans, space usage flexibility, about 1000 years ago. That
style was copied again and again. There are also many non-integrative
contemporary buildings that do not try to imitate a style, so I'm still not
unconvinced about this - but again this is clearly a pretty big generalization
without any significant research, but something to think about.

~~~
qaexl
I don't know that much about architecture so I'll take your word for it.
Thanks for the conversation.

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mdemare
This is simply an utterly brilliant and original way to explain the Chinese
writing system!

Still, in this age of 100dpi 24bit color monitors, why stick to monochrome
line drawings for yingzi? One could create the world's first photorealistic
writing system!

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wensing
You mean: "If English _were_ written like Chinese".

Subjunctive mood, people!

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kirse
No thanks, I like my language the way it is... it was tough enough learning
cursive as a kid, no way in hell I'm drawing tiny pictures just so you can
better understand my language ;)

