10 Sep
2007
10 Sep
'07
11:31 a.m.
Liam Proven wrote:
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. Learning to associate a symbol with it's meaning is
pretty much the definition of literacy. 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.)
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! [...] The symbols in Chinese no longer resemble the concepts
behind them in
any recognisable way, but it is the single biggest single-language
nation on the planet. Their literally hundreds of dissimilar
mutually-unintelligible dialects and tongues are united by a single
written language, one which has no connection with the spoken forms,
which is based on pictograms.
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 try to bring this back on-topic, I was hoping somebody would weigh in with
'earliest' examples of 0/1 on IBM equipment, which might be argued to be where
the whole trend started.