🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <268@odyssey.UUCP> gls@odyssey.UUCP (g.l.sicherman) writes:


>If the anti-diacritic stand is one extreme, my stand must be the other
>extreme.  I think that alphabetic writing is obsolete in the electronic age.
>
>It's a question of power and function.  Computers have the power and
>flexibility to handle any kind of writing.  Under the circumstances,
>ideograms, whose forms are independent of their sounds, serve better
>for communication than any phonetic representation.  The old advantage
>of alphabetic writing was that it was suited to old information tech-
>nologies.
>
>Alphabetic writing divorces sound from sense (McLuhan's observation).
>Computers divorce everything from sense.
>-- 
>Col. G. L. Sicherman
>...!ihnp4!odyssey!gls

Uhh... How long did it take you to learn written Chinese?  Seriously,
I have heard that arguement from a number of native speakers of
Chinese, because the Chinese ideogram is a graphic representation of
the concept that it represents.  To a non native Chinese speaker, it
isn't so obvious.

If you try to go with "human universals", you will have trouble with
"Koko want bananna", and it gets worse with complexity.

The concepts that McLuhan seems to deal with are on the level of
selling soap.

A useful excercise.  Come up with some proposed symbols for some
abstract concepts.  Post them without identifying which is which.  See
if people can pick out which symbol goes with which concept.  Some
suggestions:

Entropy                            E. Coli
the philosophy of Hegel            The Board of Directors of TRW
Kaiser Willhelm I                  The Mongol invasion of Russia
The Italian Renaissance            The Mossbauer effect

Hmm.  Those concepts are expressed above, in symbols made of grubby
old Latin letters.  A symbol doesn't have to be made of random dots.
Consider the (vague) phonetic correspondance as a learning aid.
-- 
                           __
 -- Steve          /      /  \      /         "Truth is stranger than
S. G. Smith      I \ O    |  _    O \ I        fiction because fiction
smith@cos.com      /      \__/      /          has to make sense."