--- Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw(a)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_…
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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