lishka@uwslh.UUCP (a.k.a. Fish-Guts) (09/04/89)
craig@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Craig Hubley) writes: >Well, it does exist and it's called Chinese. Yes, I know it's been said >before, but I for one would be *very glad* to learn Chinese characters, which >in fact only has to be done once per lifetime, than learn a dozen stupid icons >every time I fire up a new Mac, Sun, or NeXT application. The fact is, it's >*easier* to learn Chinese than do this again, over and over, dozens of times. However, the point of the original discussion (as I understood it) was to find icons that are easy to understand for those other than computer users. I like your idea of using Chinese/Japanese characters (also known as pictograms). Unfortunately, although these pictograms started out as iconic representations which closely resembled real objects and actions, their forms have been altered over the years so that the pictograms now only vaguely resemble the originals. These days, most non-computer-users would probably have a hard time identifying an action/object from an unknown Chinese/Japanese character. Another problem (which you pointed out) is the different meanings that characters can have (even within the *same* language). One character sometimes (usually?) has more than one meaning; if you see the character on the screen, which meaning does it represent? It is obvious that if this is going to work, some "standard" (oh no, not another one!) will have to be drafted describing which characters to use and the single meaning they would have if used as a computer icon. I really like your idea. Having spoken fluent Japanese when I was young (which I have subsequently forgotten), I would welcome this approach to icons; hell, now that you have spoken out, I may convert my icons to characters instead. However, characters used as icons will not help non-computer-users, and this is something that concerns me very much. One of the attractions of the Macintosh was that it had icons which were fairly easy to learn and recognize. This allowed a lot more people to start out with it, because it was not intimidating. However, at least for non-Chinese/Japanese, using characters as icons would remove that "ease-of-use" and would result in another level of cryptic information that has to be learned, possibly resulting in more people being turned off. This is a huge drawback, in my eyes. > Craig Hubley ------------------------------------- -- Christopher Lishka ...!{rutgers|ucbvax|...}!uwvax!uwslh!lishka Wisconsin State Lab of Hygiene lishka%uwslh.uucp@cs.wisc.edu Data Processing Section (608)262-4485 lishka@uwslh.uucp "What a waste it is to lose one's mind -- or not to have a mind at all. How true that is." -- V.P. Dan Quayle, garbling the United Negro College Fund slogan in an address to the group (from Newsweek, May 22nd, 1989)
efrethei@blackbird.afit.af.mil (Erik J. Fretheim) (09/05/89)
Since Chinese and Japanese have been quashed as the computer ideogramatic language of choice why not drift back several thousand years to the mid-east. There were a couple of languages there which might be of service, and being dead languages they won't have the disadvantage of changing just as you get to know them. -- erik
lishka@uwslh.UUCP (Brain-fried after too much hacking) (09/23/89)
rpb@dasys1.UUCP (Robert Brady) writes: > Isn't Chinese made up of 100 and some odd building blocks? The interactions between these would be in some sort of system. No. *Written* Chinese is composed of tens of thousands of "characters" (i.e. symbols). Most of the time, these characters have meanings in the same way that English words have meanings. Many times one single character can have several different meanings. *Spoken* Chinese is made up of a small number of short "syllable-like" words. These short words differ mostly in "inflection"; e.g. whether the your tone rises or falls while you are saying the words. One of these words can have a multitude of different meanings, of which the correct one depends entirely on context. In addition, a single *written* character can represent many different spoken words. Japanese is a bit different. Many, many centuries ago Japan had a *spoken* language but no written language. Since the Japanese were very friendly with the Chinese at the time, they adapted the Chinese characters as the *written* Japanese language (which they call "kanji"). Therefore, Japanese and Chinese characters are very similar, although not really identical. In addition to the Chinese characters which the Japanese used, they also developed a written "alphabet" of single-syllable sounds (which are very regular and phonetic) based on their spoken language. The alphabet is made up of about 50 "letters". There are two written forms of the Japanese alphabet: "hiragana" are used for all native Japanese words, and "katakana" are used for foreign words. The Japanese *spoken* language is basically "words" made up of letters/sounds from their alphabet. Characters are used as written representations of words. Again, there are many cases where a single character can have many meanings, and there are tens of thousands of characters. Japanese and Chinese characters are very similar, to the extent that if you know one of the languages you can make a decent attempt at determining the meaning of characters in the other language. However, spoken Japanese and Chinese are very different. Also, Japanese has an alphabet based on their spoken language, from which words are constructed; Chinese does not have a written alphabet, and I am not sure if their spoken language is similar to an alphabet. In my mind, Japanese is sort of a collision of an "alphabetic" spoken language (such as English) with a "character-based" written language (i.e. Chinese); others may not agree with this. Some of the above might be wrong (could someone who knows more please correct the errors above?). My credentials: I spoke Japanese fluently as a child (I went to Japanese public schools, even though I am an American). I have since forgotten most of it, although I had a couple refresher courses in college. I do not know Chinese at all. However, many of my friends are either Chinese (mainland or Hong Kong), fluent in Chinese (including Hong Kong, Mandarin, and Taiwanese dialects), or have majored in it in college. My knowledge of Chinese comes froms discussions with them. > In other words you would only need memorize 100+ symbols and learn how >they interact. Of course I've yet to see incomprehensible icons... Nope; this won't work. I believe that one could map *most* of the Chinese/Japanese characters with a 16-bit character set (i.e. 65535 distinct characters), and certainly all of the common ones (most Japanese do not know all of the characters, just like most native English speakers do not know all of the English words). However, much more than 100 characters/symbols would be needed. Furthermore, whereas current icons graphically represent ideas with fairly "understanable" pictures, Japanese/Chinese characters do not pictorally represent their respective ideas anymore. Even though the Chinese characters started out as fairly identifiable pictures, through hundreds (thousands?) of years they have been transformed into icons that do not resemble their meanings much. And finally, which meanings would you choose for the characters/icons: Japanese or Chinese? Either way you would end up offending someone. I prefer icons that are not tied to *any language*. Certainly all icons are somehow tied to some culture(s). I do not think using Japanese/Chinese characters as "standard" icons would work, although it is an interesting idea. -- Christopher Lishka ...!{rutgers|ucbvax|...}!uwvax!uwslh!lishka Wisconsin State Lab of Hygiene lishka%uwslh.uucp@cs.wisc.edu Data Processing Section (608)262-4485 lishka@uwslh.uucp "What a waste it is to lose one's mind -- or not to have a mind at all. How true that is." -- V.P. Dan Quayle, garbling the United Negro College Fund slogan in an address to the group (from Newsweek, May 22nd, 1989)
d-yang@cs.columbia.edu (David Yang) (09/25/89)
(preface: The following is based on what I know from experiences with my (warning?) parents, who speak and write Chinese, and a few years of classes plus informal learning.) In article <446@uwslh.UUCP>, lishka@uwslh.UUCP (Brain-fried after too much hacking) writes: > No. *Written* Chinese is composed of tens of thousands of > "characters" (i.e. symbols). Most of the time, these characters have I believe Robert Brady was referring to the radicals that make up the tens of thousands of characters. The radicals do give hints in meaning (like knowing the roots of words) and pronunciation and help in both memorizing characters and telling someone how to write a character, but the translation is still non-trivial. Also, though this may not be absolutely necessary, it seems that the icons people are thinking of are hopefully something almost anyone would approximate if asked to come up with an icon for the same thing. But Chinese characters still seem to be just memorized. > Furthermore, whereas current icons graphically represent ideas > with fairly "understanable" pictures, Japanese/Chinese characters do > not pictorally represent their respective ideas anymore. Even though This is true-- actually, I'm not that sure the original characters were all that understandable. The character for big (da1) was supposed to represent a big man, which doesn't seem inherently universal. > I prefer icons that are not tied to *any language*. Certainly > all icons are somehow tied to some culture(s). I do not think using > Japanese/Chinese characters as "standard" icons would work, although > it is an interesting idea. I agree-- e.g., one might be able to pick up that a big man represents "big," but I think this requires some knowledge of the way Chinese words are built up to know that the character didn't mean, say, "adult." And I think you might still have problems with the meanings of symbols in different contexts. David d-yang@cs.columbia.edu