10 Sep
2007
10 Sep
'07
6:02 p.m.
On 10/09/2007, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> 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.
Quite why I'd want illeterates to be connecting cables to my computer is
totally beyond me...
I never can tell with you, Tony, whether you faking it and taking the
mick, being deliberately obtuse to make some kind of point, or
genuinely think in a very strange way.
The point, as I have already spelled out abundantly clearly, is that
someone may be perfectly literate and fluent in multiple languages and
completely unfamiliar with English or even the Roman script.
People who do not speak, read or write English use computers too, you
know. What's more, they outnumber us by a very large margin. The
biggest country in the world not only doesn't use our alphabet, it
doesn't natively use an alphabet of any kind whatsoever.
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! [...] If you have to learn that $icon means 'connect
printer cable here' you
can equally easilly learn that you connect said cable to a connector
labelled wit hte string of chracters 'printer'. Or 'imprimante'. Or
'drucker' or whatver it is in any other langage. Am English-language
manual fro a French device could quite easliy contain the statement
'Connect the parellel printer cable to the 25 pin socket labelled
'imprimante'' . That would be as easy to follow as using the icon, with
the benefit that if the manual got lost, a French-English dictionary
would explain the use of that connector.
It is much simpler for everyone concerned /all over the world/ if you
just match the symbol on the end of the cable with the one on the
socket on the back of the computer.
Yes, the word is easier, *in a single country*. But the computer
market is, and has been for many decades, an international one.
Hint: never wonder why there was a Psion 1, 2, 3 and 5 but not a 4?
Because "4" in Mandarin Chinese - a tonal language where a single
syllable has from 5 to 9 totally different meanings depending on the
tone of voice in which you sing it - Chinese is sung, not spoken - the
word for "4" is the same as the word for "death". You can't
indicate
the tone in non-Chinese writing, so when you write 4, you write death.
A machine called the Psion Death would not sell well, for obvious
reasons. So, Psion skipped the entire number. Almost anyone doing
business in China does the same.
Of course, if you write /four/ in Chinese it looks totally different
from the ideogram for /death/ - but you would have
difficulty
marketing one product in a range internationally when it was named
only in Chinese.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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