I've heard something to the effect of the Japanese language (in terms of writing) being so complicated that normally someone can't become literate until about the age of 9.
Well, at least not writing Kanji... it takes a little while to learn a few thousand symbols, just as it would take a child speaking any western language to learn how to correctly spell a few thousand words and phrases. Check the Slashdot audience, you'll see many people still have many problems - and I'm talking about native speakers here.
On the other hand, as impractical as Oriental writing systems may seem to us, they are tremendously practical once you learn them.
First of all, they are truly symbolic; two people speaking two different Chinese languages (or, several decades ago, even someone speaking Japanese) can communicate by writing alone. If they spoke without outlining the symbols in the air, they would probably fail to understand each other.
Furthermore, it's faster to read. Top-to-bottom direction is more convenient than side-to-side, and symbols themselves always occupy the same amount of space.
Now, I do not yet speak much Chinese or Japanese, though I plan to change that in a few years' time... but from what little I know, the writing system isn't too complicated for the modern world. It's just too error-intolerant.
So, what I'm sort of getting at is the difficulty of the written language, as well as its dissimilarities to other languages in this regard. (I.E. While not necessarily easy for just anyone, translations from Spanish to English, or English to French, or many other frequently spoken languages is relatively painless.)
Now, I am a linguist. And a translator.
And no translation is easy, except for, perhaps, technical translations between languages with well-established terminologies.
It even goes so far that I can translate English poetry to one Croatian dialect, but not to another one (although they should rightly be called languages, but that's yet another problem) - just because one is iambic, like English, while the other is trochaic.
Some things will take you hours or days or even more because they're so easy to say in the source language, but almost impossible to say in the target language. Sometimes an author will explain in detail a concept strange to the source language, and trivial in the target language... and you have to account for all that.
Besides, I may be wrong, but isn't Japanese more frequently spoken than French or Italian?
I believe a worldwide language is sort of what the world is headed for. Thinking of what language would be best suited for a wide audience, I think a Romance language would probably be best. (Though English does work, though I may be biased, but a lot of the industrialized world is sort of slowly teaching it if simply for easier trade with the US/Canadian/British/Australian businesses)
Actually, that would be Chinese.
If the world were heading for a single, unifying language, I think Chinese would be the best choice; however, I don't think it's going to happen.
Anyway, note the advantages of Chinese: simple grammar, no morphology, allegedly the most convenient language for computerised (phonetic) analysis. So the writing is a bit more complicated; that's actually a lesser problem.
I have no intentions of moving to Japan, learning the language (it'd be sweet to order things that won't come to America/get it early, but it's an extremely complicated and, in my opinion, somewhat archaic language. English may be complicated grammatically, but we still only use 26 characters, most of which are identical to Romance/Germanic languages. And, as a multi-lingual friend has said to me, other than our grammar, English's biggest problem, if anything, is that it's overly simple in structure.)
The only problem with the structure of the English language is that it gave birth to TGG.
But I'd like to know why exactly you consider Japanese language archaic... and do you consider it complicated for any reason besides writing.
I know it seems irrelevant, but I'm really interested.
that's funny because nice images are exactly what i get. when the world cup was in the u.s. and i lived in chicago it was awesome having fans walking about in big groups, singing, honking, etc. i'd never seen anything like it and haven't since, it was a lot of fun. maybe seeing it too much is the problem. for me it was a really novel and cool thing.
Well, I live in Croatia.
We have probably the worst-behaved fans in the world, second only to the English.
And the UK plays nice with the rest of the world, so they don't export their misbehaving fans.
But even without that, I don't understand football, and neither do many of my friends.
So whenever somebody starts talking football, we look at them just like they'd look at us if we started discussing Indo-European linguistics or Windows vs. Linux.
Ah, let me just tag this article 'semanticweb'... there, much better now...
As early as 2007? Now I don't really believe that.
It may get partially implemented, and probably only in English.
Maybe Chinese as well.
Most of the other languages will have to wait for quite a while beforehand...
Not to say semantic search is a bad idea or anything... I, for one, would like to see some image-, audio- and video-search based on some kind of semantics, not tags and names... but that'll just have to wait.
And you can be a fanboy of the Oakland Raiders and noone blinks an eye...
Check Google... ah, that's what I'd thought... a football club.
Though in Europe football is the name of a completely different game, let's pretend that they're the same for all practical purposes.
If I see a football fan, I usually immediately think "what a moron" or, more often, "what a bunch of morons".
Seeing quite a lot of people wearing war^H^H^Hface paint, honking like mad and singing badly and, most importantly, heavily intoxicated somehow doesn't put any nice imags in my mind.
So yes, there are people who not only blink their eyes, but sometimes even prudently take cover when that particular kind of fanboy comes in their general vicinity.
It's just that it's a minority, so it seems reversed.
Most of our technological progress probably comes from the fact that males are willing to concentrate on things that are just stupid to the average female.
Since I can readily think of several things females are willing to concentrate on, and which are at the same time supid or downright incomprehensible to the average male, I do wonder what comes from that? Any kind of progress?
Whatever, really... Fanboyism is pretty much a generic trait of human personality, from what I've had a chance to witness... whereever you're given a choice and you choose one option, you're more likely to defend it than change your mind.
And if you do change your mind at some point, your fanboyism quotient rises.
That's why ex-smokers are even more intolerant to smokers than me, and that says something. And, of course, the most zealous fanatics are the converts.
First of all, I know of too many programs (so what if most of them are old DOS games?) which require emulation (i.e. DOSbox) to run at all under WinXP.
Second, if you bother to compile the support for old binaries in your Linux kernel, you should have no problem whatsoever.
Then again, most software on Linux is easily recompiled, so there's that, too.
I suppose if you define "natural" as "that which is not the product of sentient action", then it's not "natural". I don't understand the value of that distinction.
Then I guess you've never argued with ID "theoreticians".
The difference between man and the "natural world" is poetic, not scientific. It is a romantic view, and it is irrational.
Yet again, I repeat: man is natural; technology is not.
Then again, if everything man makes is also natural, including technology, fine. But then morality, poetry and romantic views are also natural.
So where do we go from here?
We are part of the ecosystem just like every other animal.
We are not.
Not like every other animal.
Most of us are part of an ecosystem, if a city can be called one.
Humans themselves are a part of natural selection.
Human-produced technology is natural only insofar it is made from materials found in nature, which were then through human action refined, modified, transformed or whatever.
Doesn't sound all too natural to me.
Besides, the dichotomy isn't false.
Man lives as far apart from nature as he possibly can. It's a mark of civilisation.
Nature is used and abused, but not lived in.
Other species are viewed either as food or as pests, with only a handful of pets (which are also viewed as food in some parts of the world). Whatever the view, we kill them; I can't think of any other species with the same behaviour.
So the dichotomy isn't false. It should be false, but it is true because man made it so.
Just like man made the computer you're sitting in front of.
Well, they should've evolved some mutant powers to cut through those fishing nets.
Lasers, probably.
Or maybe it's a proof of the intelligent design... they'd survived for 20 million years only to get killed by fishing nets.
Some god or other probably intended that; we can never see the Grand Plan ourselves anyway. Mysterious Ways of God's(TM) or something.
Human action, alas, has little to do with natural selection.
Were it not for that fact, you would be right.
Oh, wait... you wouldn't be right even then.
Without competition, there is less need for adaption; freeing up resources (I can hardly imagine what kind, really) has nothing to do with someone "fit" becoming "fitter".
"Fitness" you speak of is so arbitrary and dependent on a plethora of outside factors that what can be considered "fit" today may well become "completely unfit" tomorrow. Or today, but in a different climate.
Seems to me like a really nasty virus would turn it on.
And upgrade it with Clippy.
But really... I'm no programmer, but couldn't, say, a perfectly common TCP/IP stack from XP be inserted in the place of the new one?
There should be a way to do something like that... then you just make a cute screensaver, put this in the installer and off you go switching the damned thing off webwide. And see what happens, as Emperor Gregor would say.
Hell, scrap the screensaver... just proclaim it a nasty alert remover and you're set.
The added bonus is that if you're able to circumvent the protections already built-in, no antivirus program will be able to do anything... no malicious code whatsoever.
To me it seems like they've rushed both of these new "standards"...
I do wonder, though, how many more times will Sony have to lose because of their stubbornness before they realize it might be more beneficial playing nice with others... ah, well...
Completely offtopic: why can't I reply directly to the article anymore? What happened to the RSS feeds from Google? I'm away for a few days and all hell breaks loose...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, at least not writing Kanji... it takes a little while to learn a few thousand symbols, just as it would take a child speaking any western language to learn how to correctly spell a few thousand words and phrases. Check the Slashdot audience, you'll see many people still have many problems - and I'm talking about native speakers here.
On the other hand, as impractical as Oriental writing systems may seem to us, they are tremendously practical once you learn them.
First of all, they are truly symbolic; two people speaking two different Chinese languages (or, several decades ago, even someone speaking Japanese) can communicate by writing alone. If they spoke without outlining the symbols in the air, they would probably fail to understand each other.
Furthermore, it's faster to read. Top-to-bottom direction is more convenient than side-to-side, and symbols themselves always occupy the same amount of space.
Now, I do not yet speak much Chinese or Japanese, though I plan to change that in a few years' time... but from what little I know, the writing system isn't too complicated for the modern world. It's just too error-intolerant.
Now, I am a linguist. And a translator.
And no translation is easy, except for, perhaps, technical translations between languages with well-established terminologies.
It even goes so far that I can translate English poetry to one Croatian dialect, but not to another one (although they should rightly be called languages, but that's yet another problem) - just because one is iambic, like English, while the other is trochaic.
Some things will take you hours or days or even more because they're so easy to say in the source language, but almost impossible to say in the target language. Sometimes an author will explain in detail a concept strange to the source language, and trivial in the target language... and you have to account for all that.
Besides, I may be wrong, but isn't Japanese more frequently spoken than French or Italian?
Actually, that would be Chinese.
If the world were heading for a single, unifying language, I think Chinese would be the best choice; however, I don't think it's going to happen.
Anyway, note the advantages of Chinese: simple grammar, no morphology, allegedly the most convenient language for computerised (phonetic) analysis. So the writing is a bit more complicated; that's actually a lesser problem.
The only problem with the structure of the English language is that it gave birth to TGG.
But I'd like to know why exactly you consider Japanese language archaic... and do you consider it complicated for any reason besides writing.
I know it seems irrelevant, but I'm really interested.
But then you have a browser called Internet Explorer... Confused yet?
This would have sounded so much bolder if you hadn't posted anonymously...
Evolution of computers has, alas, proven to be much speedier than evolution of human mind.
Semantically correct posts will have to wait until computers start writing them.
Well, I live in Croatia.
We have probably the worst-behaved fans in the world, second only to the English.
And the UK plays nice with the rest of the world, so they don't export their misbehaving fans.
But even without that, I don't understand football, and neither do many of my friends.
So whenever somebody starts talking football, we look at them just like they'd look at us if we started discussing Indo-European linguistics or Windows vs. Linux.
Ah, let me just tag this article 'semanticweb'... there, much better now...
As early as 2007? Now I don't really believe that.
It may get partially implemented, and probably only in English.
Maybe Chinese as well.
Most of the other languages will have to wait for quite a while beforehand...
Not to say semantic search is a bad idea or anything... I, for one, would like to see some image-, audio- and video-search based on some kind of semantics, not tags and names... but that'll just have to wait.
Check Google... ah, that's what I'd thought... a football club.
Though in Europe football is the name of a completely different game, let's pretend that they're the same for all practical purposes.
If I see a football fan, I usually immediately think "what a moron" or, more often, "what a bunch of morons".
Seeing quite a lot of people wearing war^H^H^Hface paint, honking like mad and singing badly and, most importantly, heavily intoxicated somehow doesn't put any nice imags in my mind.
So yes, there are people who not only blink their eyes, but sometimes even prudently take cover when that particular kind of fanboy comes in their general vicinity.
It's just that it's a minority, so it seems reversed.
Since I can readily think of several things females are willing to concentrate on, and which are at the same time supid or downright incomprehensible to the average male, I do wonder what comes from that? Any kind of progress?
Whatever, really... Fanboyism is pretty much a generic trait of human personality, from what I've had a chance to witness... whereever you're given a choice and you choose one option, you're more likely to defend it than change your mind.
And if you do change your mind at some point, your fanboyism quotient rises.
That's why ex-smokers are even more intolerant to smokers than me, and that says something. And, of course, the most zealous fanatics are the converts.
Of course there are. They are usually called metrosexuals. Or gays.
Not to mention other names.
But see? every kind of fanboy, including soap and shampoo fanboys gets dissed by everyone else, including other fanboys.
Truly, we never grow up.
First of all, I know of too many programs (so what if most of them are old DOS games?) which require emulation (i.e. DOSbox) to run at all under WinXP.
Second, if you bother to compile the support for old binaries in your Linux kernel, you should have no problem whatsoever.
Then again, most software on Linux is easily recompiled, so there's that, too.
They are not worth of my time either.
However, people who might read their posts might get swayed by their arguments if there is no-one to counter them.
And they are worth my time.
Then I guess you've never argued with ID "theoreticians".
Yet again, I repeat: man is natural; technology is not.
Then again, if everything man makes is also natural, including technology, fine. But then morality, poetry and romantic views are also natural.
So where do we go from here?
We are not.
Not like every other animal.
Most of us are part of an ecosystem, if a city can be called one.
Oh, I do not consider myself an environmentalist in the least.
I just don't like this kind of fatalistic attitude.
Humans themselves are a part of natural selection.
Human-produced technology is natural only insofar it is made from materials found in nature, which were then through human action refined, modified, transformed or whatever.
Doesn't sound all too natural to me.
Besides, the dichotomy isn't false.
Man lives as far apart from nature as he possibly can. It's a mark of civilisation.
Nature is used and abused, but not lived in.
Other species are viewed either as food or as pests, with only a handful of pets (which are also viewed as food in some parts of the world). Whatever the view, we kill them; I can't think of any other species with the same behaviour.
So the dichotomy isn't false. It should be false, but it is true because man made it so.
Just like man made the computer you're sitting in front of.
Well, they should've evolved some mutant powers to cut through those fishing nets.
Lasers, probably.
Or maybe it's a proof of the intelligent design... they'd survived for 20 million years only to get killed by fishing nets.
Some god or other probably intended that; we can never see the Grand Plan ourselves anyway. Mysterious Ways of God's(TM) or something.
Human action, alas, has little to do with natural selection.
Were it not for that fact, you would be right.
Oh, wait... you wouldn't be right even then.
Without competition, there is less need for adaption; freeing up resources (I can hardly imagine what kind, really) has nothing to do with someone "fit" becoming "fitter".
"Fitness" you speak of is so arbitrary and dependent on a plethora of outside factors that what can be considered "fit" today may well become "completely unfit" tomorrow. Or today, but in a different climate.
And upgrade it with Clippy.
But really... I'm no programmer, but couldn't, say, a perfectly common TCP/IP stack from XP be inserted in the place of the new one?
There should be a way to do something like that... then you just make a cute screensaver, put this in the installer and off you go switching the damned thing off webwide. And see what happens, as Emperor Gregor would say.
Hell, scrap the screensaver... just proclaim it a nasty alert remover and you're set.
The added bonus is that if you're able to circumvent the protections already built-in, no antivirus program will be able to do anything... no malicious code whatsoever.
Well done, humans...
Did they say 'So long, and thanks for all the fish'?
You really want to bring down Open Source, don't you?
There's a reason no-one has done that yet.
So it appears that the new definition of 'clean' is "we haven't made any patches yet".
Sounds like Stef Murky himself thought up this one...
To me it seems like they've rushed both of these new "standards"...
I do wonder, though, how many more times will Sony have to lose because of their stubbornness before they realize it might be more beneficial playing nice with others... ah, well...
Completely offtopic: why can't I reply directly to the article anymore? What happened to the RSS feeds from Google? I'm away for a few days and all hell breaks loose...
Because you cammot prove it... they just defimed it as such.