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The increasing use of icons and emoji suggests that English will become like Chinese! (Ever try to look up an icon in a dictionary? This puts paid to the idea that icons are decipherable by people who don't know the language. Copyrighting the icons makes even that infinitely worse, as it prevents standardization.)
As someone who has studied both Chinese and Japanese, this article read very fluidly. Curious how other readers have found this?
Well, maybe that was the point, though -- that the priorities of the language may change over time, and eventually you're dealing with 2000 year old Cockney rhyming slang baked into your written language. But that's just the opinion of one guy sitting on his Vannevar.
The increasing use of icons and emoji suggests that English will become like Chinese! (Ever try to look up an icon in a dictionary? This puts paid to the idea that icons are decipherable by people who don't know the language. Copyrighting the icons makes even that infinitely worse, as it prevents standardization.)
http://ce.linedict.com/dict.html#/cnen/home
See the paintbrush next to the magnifying glass in the search field.
[work] + [fight] + [sun] is poor Huffmanization of the common English suffix -tion . That's what, 14 strokes when English just takes 7? Well, maybe that was the point, though -- that the priorities of the language may change over time, and eventually you're dealing with 2000 year old Cockney rhyming slang baked into your written language. But that's just the opinion of one guy sitting on his Vannevar.
What a breath of fresh air is a 1999-era web page. Fast loading, simple, readable.
This article is actually a lot better at explaining the characters system used in both china and Japan, than the articles that have hit the front page today and in the last week or so.
As a result Japanese people (probably Chinese too) have a hard time processing some of the English syllables. This creates difficulty in learning English for Japanese and Chinese, and in turn, it leads to isolation. It's like a "cultural moat" separating ideographic languages from phonetic ones. If they tried to give it up, it would be sad, because of all the history and beauty it has, but on the other hand, in these countries children in the 5th grade can't properly read a newspaper because they need to already know 2000 characters and many more combinations of characters by rote. By comparison, a first grader can read a newspaper in English.
In terms of programming, Chinese is like Perl (even Perl6! - huge, complex, mysterious, beautiful) and English is like Lua (small, elegant, expressive).
"There is a standing joke among sinologists that one of the first signs of senility in a China scholar is the compulsion to come up with a new romanization method"[1]. That's how much they are bothered by the huge initial cost of learning it.
[1] "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" - http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
What a breath of fresh air is a 1999-era web page. Fast loading, simple, readable.
...horrid color schemes, no support for mobile devices...yeah, what a breath of fresh air.