--- Tomasz Wegrzanowski taw@users.sf.net wrote:
Seriously, you should just learn Chinese ;-)
Ah, Thomas, but that would be too easy. ;)
http://www.symbolwiki.org/index.php?title=Symbolwiki:Critique#Why_not_just_l... Why not just learn Chinese? A set range of conceptually broad verbs and nouns may work, but if you want the same depth of communication present in other languages you will end up with tens of thousands of characters and character-combinations like in Chinese .. and then why not just learn chinese? - Anon Its a good point. But the idea isnt so much that one language take precedence over another, rather that a system is devised by which people can collaborate accross cultures and implement changes to the language, or "a" language. Chinese itself is constantly changing, and these changes are increasingly reflecting the influence of the web. In the context of a true cross-cultural language, the criticism of a language not being as deep as another arent really valid. Even a library of a hundred basic symbols would be far more efficient for the larger transcultural goal, than any of the localized languages can be.
If Chinese were to "be changed", why not let the process be open to a much larger audience? That would mean that it would no longer be Chinese, rather something based on what everyone brings to it. This would include ideas like mine for representing social roles, (and strength yet to be uploaded) which attempt to organize symbols in to contexts, within which small modifiers (usually a single dot or a line) can alter the radical �rather than use the same compound forms that Chinese does. This is the main criticism, that these term-compounds reflect terms that differ accross local languages. My point is that these will not matter - the basic functions can be unified, and the more complex forms can be constructed in different ways - some may have even have redundant meanings, until they are reconciled. -KuniShiro 19:08, 22 Mar 2004 (CET) ----
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