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From: jwtlai@watcgl.waterloo.edu (Jim W Lai)
Subject: Re: Images vs. Text
Message-ID: <1991Apr6.002410.12230@watcgl.waterloo.edu>
Organization: University of Waterloo
References: <jpenny.670789735@s.ms.uky.edu> <1991Apr5.032157.10421@ecf.utoronto.ca> <jpenny.670886764@s.ms.uky.edu>
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Date: Sat, 6 Apr 1991 00:24:10 GMT
Lines: 37

In article <jpenny.670886764@s.ms.uky.edu> jpenny@ms.uky.edu (Jim Penny) writes:
>xiaoy@ecf.toronto.edu (XIAO  Yan) writes:
>>	Ever learnt a language Called Chinese which doesn't use alphabetic
>>	letters?
>
>Of course there are two living counter-examples, Chinese which is 
>not character oriented, but neither is it especially pictogram oriented
>either (most characters have long ago lost any pictorial content).
>
>A second partial example is Japanese which uses kanji,
>as well as katakana, hiragana, and romanji.  This is not to be insulting
>to Japanese tradition, but it is almost incomprehensible that a 
>people would insist on writing primarily in a foreign language.
>It is as if all Europeans still wrote only in church Latin. 

Before the introduction of Chinese characters, Japan had no native written
language of note.  This formed kanji.  (Katakana and hiragana are phonetic
alphabets.)  Is it any surprise the Japanese still use kanji when writers
of English use an alphabet which is very similar to the Roman alphabet?
The smallest decomposable parts in the two systems have not changed a
great deal.

>For defenders of the Chinese writing system  I have three questions:
>1) how many characters are in use today in written Chinese?
>2) how many characters were in use 1000 years ago in written Chines?
>3) If Chinese writing is inherently simpler than an alphabetic systems,
>how is this trend to be explained?

Question 3 implies the existence of a trend (presumably an increase).
I fail to see what the number of ideograms has on the simplicity of a
system.  Would using Morse code instead of the normal alphabet make
things simpler, as there are only four letters in such a system
(dot, dash, pause, long pause)?

My point is that if we are to judge cognitive performance, we need a
metric.  "Simpler" and "more intuitive" are ill-defined terms to begin
with.