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From: nakashim@russell.STANFORD.EDU (Hideyuki Nakashima)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Infinite alphabets
Message-ID: <472@russell.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Tue, 20-Oct-87 17:24:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: russell.472
Posted: Tue Oct 20 17:24:42 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 22-Oct-87 07:09:50 EDT
Reply-To: nakashim@russell.stanford.edu (Hideyuki Nakashima)
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 50

In article <821@iscuva.ISCS.COM> Randyg@iscuva writes:
>In article <436@russell.STANFORD.EDU> nakashim@russell.UUCP (Hideyuki Nakashima) writes:
>>.............  No Chinese equivalent of Europian "alphabet"s exist.
>>
>>Hideyuki Nakashima
>
>I don't know much about Chinese writing, but in terms of formal game theory,
>does it really make much of a difference to the equivalence of the languages
>that chinese use simple tokens(well sorta) and europeans use complex tokens?
>From what I can tell, there is nothing that is impossible to translate either
>way(tho it may take a number of manipulations).
>
>RANDY GORDON(TAO KUO TSE FUN PEE)

What you are trying to say is no more than the arguemnt that since
Turing machine can simulate any symbol manipulation machine, all are
the same.

I agree that they are mutually translatable.  But the HEART of the
systems are different.  Europinan words are constructed on a rigit set
of alphabets.  Chinese are not.  They tried to have different
characters on each concepts they have.  But naturally, they failed on
their attempt, because their imagination was not infinite.  They could
not invent as many characters, or components of characters as
concepts.  So they ended up in using same componets in several places.

If you think each stroke of a character is like alphabet, I object.
It is just like saying each painting is composed of strokes of
brushes.  Strokes in Chinese characters are not their atomic elements.
Their radicals are rather those as:

   |             +------+             |
---+---          |      |         +--------
  /|\            +------+       --|
 / | \           |      |       --|
/  |  \  (tree)  +------+ (sun)   /       (sickness)

There are hundreds of those and most of them are themselves characters.

-- 
Hideyuki Nakashima
CSLI and ETL
nakashima@csli.stanford.edu (until Aug. 1988)
nakashima%etl.jp@relay.cs.net (afterwards)

-- 
Hideyuki Nakashima
CSLI and ETL
nakashima@csli.stanford.edu (until Aug. 1988)
nakashima%etl.jp@relay.cs.net (afterwards)