gls@odyssey.UUCP (g.l.sicherman) (08/27/87)
> >...He seemed to think that an unaccented alphabet was a > > substantial advantage in an information age, and I would tend to agree. > > UUhy? It's not only an "information age" but an "international age" so uue > need to deal uuith various conventions of different natural languages. 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 I think that alphabetic writing is obsolete in the electronic age.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
smith@COS.COM (Steve Smith) (08/29/87)
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 I think that alphabetic writing is obsolete in the electronic age.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."