[WikiEN-l] This is the English Wikipedia - Ideas

[Stevertigo]

Vicki's Right - and well thought out...

The Chinese have a different but similar problem.. Their pictographs
originally were sposed to be ideographic - compound ideas to represent more
difficult concepts, etc..

The problem was that Han Chinese was only one of hundreds of varied dialects
that developed over the millenia (Chinas a huge place). To make a long story
short, Chinese today is a combination of ideographic, phonetic (horse+female
means mother as horse indicates a "ma" sound.) deflective ( ideographs one
step removed etc.) and lastly there are pictures that represent things that
noone can figure out how and why the hell they got that way. :)

As [[ethnoconvergence]] continues at its speedy rate - the notions of
holding onto traditional ways of doing things should simply be left to
happen, But this wont happen - it will cause people to get pissy and wars
will happen and thats what sucks about humanity. Funny I just read a little
piece about this in a well known graphic novel - (email for the torrent
file - clear a cd worth of disk.)

But Vicki hits it. I think the answer (in part) is a pure ideographic
system - based on the thousands of years development of Han gi (Kanji). This
could cross boundaries and be language independent. And yes, Daniel, I would
be more than glad to correspond with you on developing this idea further.
Get a trial copy of FlashMX - and email me.

WikiLovin to all :) -SM


> The problem with phonetic spelling is, always, whose dialect? The Texan
one
> that Molly
> Ivins renders by spelling business "bidness"? New York, with our wondrous
> mix of four
> centuries of languages and accents? Glaswegian? A friend of mine was
> greatly confused
> when someone told her that "The mile is on strike"--she wondered what that
> meant, and
> whether they could use kilometers instead, before realizing that while
> she'd heard "mile",
> her Australian friend had meant "mail."
>
> As for making English easier, the language has the momentum of a billion
> speakers.
> Efforts at standardizing on any simplified English have fallen down
because
> people
> want the flexibility they get from wide vocabulary (which is not unique to
> English--the
> same problem would emerge in trying to standardize and simplify any living
> language).
>
> Making individual articles, paragraphs, and sentences clearer and easier
to
> read is a
> worthwhile task. It's one of the ways I make my living. And it can't be
> reduced to a
> formula.