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From: gls@odyssey.UUCP (g.l.sicherman)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: electronic age
Message-ID: <268@odyssey.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 27-Aug-87 11:22:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: odyssey.268
Posted: Thu Aug 27 11:22:17 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 29-Aug-87 10:24:21 EDT
References: <142700010@tiger.UUCP> <2792@phri.UUCP> <1434@ico.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Middletown, NJ
Lines: 21

> >...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  I think that alphabetic writing is obsolete in the electronic age.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