Comments on: Wut if ur kid’s skool thot this wuz fine spelling?

By: Exploring the Intricacies of Bejing-hua and Chinese with syz | Lingomi Blog

Exploring the Intricacies of Bejing-hua and Chinese with syz | Lingomi Blog — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 06:08:31 +0000

[...] that might be sociolinguistic (Mandarin as future lingua franca) or esoteric, insider stuff (second round character simplifications) or random translation issues (“my ass is toast” for [...]

By: Syz

Syz — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:55:07 +0000

Damn that was fast, Max! very cool (and just what I needed to delay writing my next corporate missive)

By: Max

Max — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:45:27 +0000

Here are some sample chapters: http://www.mmtaylor.net/Literacy_Book/DOCS/pt1.html

By: Syz

Syz — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:30:23 +0000

@Zev, thanks, looks cool. But holy $%!#, what’s the $176 price tag all about? This may take some sleuthing.

By: Zev Handel

Zev Handel — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:24:23 +0000

@Syz,

I probably shouldn’t have made so bold a claim without hedging a bit — this is based on both my own experience with Japanese and Chinese writing, and on things I’ve read here and there.

The book “Writing and Literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese” by Taylor and Taylor (Benjamins, 1995) makes a strong case for the efficiencies of the writing system, and contains some good information on the psycholinguistics of reading. But it’s also problematic in some of its claims about how Chinese-character writing systems work. But it — and the many review articles that have been written on it — would make a good place to start researching more about this topic.

Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Literacy-Chinese-Japanese-Language/dp/9027217947/

By: Chrix

Chrix — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:55:14 +0000

Sorry, no time to check sources right now, but how I’ve understood this debate: there’s research from Japan that suggests that the Japanese writing system is indeed highly efficient, but these findings have been questioned by some other scholars, but unfortunately I don’t recall the details.. .

By: Syz

Syz — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:37:26 +0000

@Zev:
“Japanese writing is incredibly efficient”
and
“Regardless, both [Hanzi and Japanese] will remain very efficient ways to READ, thanks to the high degree of logography in both scripts.”

Is this just your sense of it, or is there some kind of research on this?

By: Max

Max — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:40:30 +0000

Maybe you guys already know this, but I just stumbled upon a most interesting Wikipedia page, which describes a phonetic and very-well developed alphabet for English, called “Quikskript”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript

I personally think this is totally awesome

By: Kellen Parker

Kellen Parker — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 04:23:03 +0000

Max: Fair enough. I studied Latin and Sanskrit so I can’t really argue against that.

By: Zev Handel

Zev Handel — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:48:24 +0000

Another brief point: Even without the disappearance of the keyboard (and I certainly wouldn’t put any money behind that prediction!), Chinese character entry will continue to become more efficient. The power and sophistication of the input methods is increasing rapidly. Through improved databases of word and character frequency and improved context-driven algorithms, the ability of the computer to predict which character you intend will probably be astonishingly better in just a few years. And since each Chinese morpheme has a maximum of six keystrokes in pinyin (excluding tone), on average shorter than for English, writing in Chinese should end up being significantly more efficient than writing in English — whether one is using characters or pinyin as the ultimate written form.