🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <u+XIi3BEPuS3Ewyn@jmwa.demon.co.uk>,
John Woodgate  <jmw@jmwa.demon.co.uk> wrote:
><7fhfp1l58t.fsf@faith.csis.hku.hk>, Lee Sau Dan ~{@nJX6X~}
><sdlee@faith.csis.hku.hk> inimitably wrote:
>>The Chinese way of  asking "Did you go to the store?"  is: "Are you in
>>the state of 'having gone to the store'?"
>>
>>That's not  just a picture of  "you" and "store" and  an arrow meaning
>>"go".  Chinese plays a lot with states, or more technically, "temporal
>>aspect".  Moreover, the verb "go" is much more precise in meaning than
>>just  an "arrow".   An  "arrow" can  mean  "go", "possess",  "attack",
>>"like", "hate", "inside", "is a kind of", ...
>
>I do appreciate that. I did use the word simplistic', after all. What I
>am saying is that a pictogrammatical language, not wholly dissimilar to
>an ideogrammatical language, is possible, and has the potential of being
>more precise that a word-based language.

.... and you claim this on the basis of what evidence?

One of the "advantages" of any natural language, pictographic
or alphabetic, is that new words can be coined and hence any
language can be arbitrarily precise -- look at the degree of
precision chemists use in discussing novel compounds, and then
the degree of precision that their marketing departments use in
coining new names for marketing purposes (Claritin, Xantac, Viagra, &c).

What I thought you were arguing a few posts back was that the
advantage of a pictographic representation is that it gives a more
natural mapping to the underlying world -- the relationship between
sign and symbolized isn't arbitrary.  Unfortunately, this fails for
several reasons -- one, there's no way that you can't make non-arbitary
relationships to abstract concepts, and two, that different languages
will divide the universe-space into different categories, so you'll
need to put in all the bad-old-arbitrariness in a new guise.

	-kitten