10 Sep
2007
10 Sep
'07
5:47 p.m.
On 10/09/2007, Brent Hilpert <hilpert at cs.ubc.ca> wrote:
Liam Proven wrote:
Er, no.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictogram
On 10/09/2007, Rob <robert at
irrelevant.com> wrote:
A pictogram which is not obviously a representation of it's target is not a
pictogram, it's a symbol. On 10/09/2007, Liam Proven <lproven at
gmail.com> wrote:
That's true, but then, a simple old dot-matrix makes a more
distinctive pictogram than a laser, which tends to be a simple box.
But so long as people learn to associate the pictogram with its
meaning, it works, and it's international and does not require
literacy. But a little picture of a printer works
everywhere.
Only if you know what a printer is looks like. And I don't know about
you, but the "little picture of a printer" on, let's say, the Print
button in MS Word, looks absolutely nothing like any of the printers I
have here. Now *I* know that it looks like a big old impact printer,
with output coming from the top, but the vast majority of the general
public these days will never have seen such a beast! [...] Learning to associate a symbol with it's meaning
is
pretty much the definition of literacy.
It is a /form/ of literacy, yes.
It's an easy one without international bias, though.
The argument is that due to their
diversity, inconsistency, and non-pictogram-ness (sorry), these symbols
haven't solved anything (other than being politically correct in not giving
priority to one culture's natural language), they've just become a new obscure
language to learn. (A language which as someone else pointed out, is
unsearchable, at least for the time being.)
It is simply not possible to make an image that resembles /all/
printers. What you would then be trying to achieve is not a pictogram
but an ideogram, a symbol representing an idea or concept.
The best that we can do is a picture of a box with, coming out of it,
a piece of paper with writing on. That pretty clearly represents a
printer in every country in the world, which /no/ word for printer in
any language does.
I would argue that your example of written Chinese
actually makes the opposite
point to your intent: one has to be literate in the now arbitrary association
of symbols to meaning to understand the symbols. It may be freed from a spoken
form but that's not the issue, the arbitrariness or non-intuitive-ness of the
association is.
To read and write Chinese, one needs to memorise a whole writing
system, including stroke order, bases and radicals, involving some ten
thousand odd symbols for good literacy. A few thousand will suffice
for everyday non-technical use.
To know a printer socket from a SCSI socket, you need to memorise
what, half a dozen? Maybe a dozen?
If you can't do that, you shouldn't be playing with computers, they're
too hard for you.
--
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