Well, that's a lovely rant and all, but what does it have to do with me and what I wrote?
Your claim is that "everyone has a different way of describing the same thing". You also claim that "god IS the laws of physics". On the other hand we have people claiming, for example, that Jesus is Gods son and all that. What does Jesus and the laws of physics have in common, you mean?
To me it seems as if some people use the same term ("God") to describe very different things, rather than describing the same thing with different names.
I think your usage of the word "ideogram" points to a fundamental misunderstanding. Your assertion that it's "possible to absorb a lot of information very quickly when you look at ideograms" points in the same direction (even if you're not the originator of it). Maybe the question is better phrased as "is there a significant difference in the cognitive effort required to memorize a new ideogram versus memorizing the spelling of some obscure english word?". Chinese characters are not words in themselves, and using the term "ideographic" to describe them is - it could be argued - wrong.
Basically, it's my understanding that the line between "ideographic" and alphabetic writing systems is thinner than you'd think. If you are interested in the subject I would recommend browsing around a bit at this site, in particular The Ideographic Myth might be of interest, an excerpt from a book by John DeFrancis. It's a much better source of information than my short rant above.
If they went full-on kana, they would need to incorporate spaces in addition to the usual punctuation.
I don't get it. If you could actually get the Japanese to abandon kanji in favor of kana, why would throwing in some extra spaces present much of a problem? And the homophone problem is greatly overstated. Some writing styles would certainly need to change a bit, but you can hardly be arguing that Japanese people can't hold a normal conversation without resorting to kanji.
In fact, "it's easy to input them with a word processor nowadays" was one of the arguments in favor of increasing the number of general-use kanji in Japan, to me implying that it's not seen as very important to be able to write them all by hand anymore.
Well, I'm not a learner of Chinese (although the same applies to Japanese I guess, sort of), but - as far as I know - being able to read modern Chinese does not mean that you are able to make perfect sense of classical written Chinese. So, you need to study either way. Maybe the amount of study needed is less if you are familiar with the modern character usage, but it still takes effort to appreciate the really old written history.
As languages evolve, I guess this is kind of universal. On that basis, I'm not sure your argument is a good one.
I have lately disabled my swap for a very simple reason: with 4GB of RAM, the swap was only ever used when some rouge application suddenly went into an eat-all-memory loop *cough*adobe flash*cough*.
It might not be a good reason in theory, but in practice I rather have the OOM kick in sooner rather than having to struggle with a system that is practically hanged due to all the swapping. I can live with having slightly less of my filesystem cached.
A ton of people out there who both think that all the Free Software/Open Source licenses are the same and are waiting impatiently for ZFS in Linux? Somehow I doubt it. And corporations are weary of OSS because the Linux developers aren't breaking Sun's(/Oracle's) purposefully GPL-incompatible license? Actually, did you have a point? I think I missed it.:-)
This looks like a perfect opportunity to highlight this recent post at the Pinyin News blog, closely related to the issue at hand!
(Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with the blog in any way, but as a former student of Japanese I can relate to the general message.)
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Well, that's a lovely rant and all, but what does it have to do with me and what I wrote?
Your claim is that "everyone has a different way of describing the same thing". You also claim that "god IS the laws of physics". On the other hand we have people claiming, for example, that Jesus is Gods son and all that. What does Jesus and the laws of physics have in common, you mean?
To me it seems as if some people use the same term ("God") to describe very different things, rather than describing the same thing with different names.
The same thing? Somehow I doubt that Hawkings "God" had a son that supposedly came down to earth and all that.. (to take one example)
I think your usage of the word "ideogram" points to a fundamental misunderstanding. Your assertion that it's "possible to absorb a lot of information very quickly when you look at ideograms" points in the same direction (even if you're not the originator of it). Maybe the question is better phrased as "is there a significant difference in the cognitive effort required to memorize a new ideogram versus memorizing the spelling of some obscure english word?". Chinese characters are not words in themselves, and using the term "ideographic" to describe them is - it could be argued - wrong.
Basically, it's my understanding that the line between "ideographic" and alphabetic writing systems is thinner than you'd think. If you are interested in the subject I would recommend browsing around a bit at this site, in particular The Ideographic Myth might be of interest, an excerpt from a book by John DeFrancis. It's a much better source of information than my short rant above.
If they went full-on kana, they would need to incorporate spaces in addition to the usual punctuation.
I don't get it. If you could actually get the Japanese to abandon kanji in favor of kana, why would throwing in some extra spaces present much of a problem? And the homophone problem is greatly overstated. Some writing styles would certainly need to change a bit, but you can hardly be arguing that Japanese people can't hold a normal conversation without resorting to kanji.
In fact, "it's easy to input them with a word processor nowadays" was one of the arguments in favor of increasing the number of general-use kanji in Japan, to me implying that it's not seen as very important to be able to write them all by hand anymore.
Well, I'm not a learner of Chinese (although the same applies to Japanese I guess, sort of), but - as far as I know - being able to read modern Chinese does not mean that you are able to make perfect sense of classical written Chinese. So, you need to study either way. Maybe the amount of study needed is less if you are familiar with the modern character usage, but it still takes effort to appreciate the really old written history.
As languages evolve, I guess this is kind of universal. On that basis, I'm not sure your argument is a good one.
I have lately disabled my swap for a very simple reason: with 4GB of RAM, the swap was only ever used when some rouge application suddenly went into an eat-all-memory loop *cough*adobe flash*cough*.
It might not be a good reason in theory, but in practice I rather have the OOM kick in sooner rather than having to struggle with a system that is practically hanged due to all the swapping. I can live with having slightly less of my filesystem cached.
A ton of people out there who both think that all the Free Software/Open Source licenses are the same and are waiting impatiently for ZFS in Linux? Somehow I doubt it. And corporations are weary of OSS because the Linux developers aren't breaking Sun's(/Oracle's) purposefully GPL-incompatible license? Actually, did you have a point? I think I missed it. :-)
This looks like a perfect opportunity to highlight this recent post at the Pinyin News blog, closely related to the issue at hand! (Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with the blog in any way, but as a former student of Japanese I can relate to the general message.)