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Re: Logo/Ideo/Phono graphic language

Posted by David Eric Smith on Oct 13, 2020; 4:32pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/labels-tp7599012p7599144.html

Hi Steve,

A linguist I knew who had written on this as a core theme was Bill Wong, then at the City University of Hong Kong (where I hoped to visit, but sadly never did), and apparently more findable as an emeritus at Berkely than at either of the Hong Kongs (City or Chinese, where I think he went for a time):
https://lx.berkeley.edu/william-s-y-wang

Bill was interested in the way ideographic writing allowed a much more rapid progression of homophony, as one now finds in standard Mandarin, which is much more reduced than Cantonese in terms of tones and (to a lesser degree) vowels, though not as reduced as modern Cantonese in terms of fricatives.  Bill used to claim that if one watches carefully around Beijing, one can see in complicated conversations, people having to sketch characters in the air to make non-obvious distinctions in which word is meant.  Steve G has lived and worked there and understood what was going on around him, and can perhaps comment on this.

I remember a draft manuscript Bill gave me to read maybe 18 years ago now, about how ideographic writing has particular strengths that are lost with a transition to alphabets or syllabaries.  Also, I am told there is a tradition of magic-square-poetry in Chinese, where something like a tic-tac-toe array of characters is supposed to be readable as a meaningful expression along each column and maybe rows or diagonals.  I think that came from Jay Garfield at Smith college, not from Bill, but I am not very sure of that sourcing.  I expect that, if one had time and inclination, a reading tree starting with Bill's review articles would lead rapidly to harder stuff.

It has also always made me wonder about the thinking behind the simplified characters.  In a careful study, did inserting random strokes in place of meaningful radicals really increase the rates of language learning?  If so, it surprises me and says something either about the nature of learning written languages, or at least about the way they were being taught.

I thought katakana arose as fragmentary writing by noble-family women relatively late, and I recall having read more but not remembering it.  How it got adopted as the standard form for foreign expressions and some more minor usages is surely something one can find in standard language books, but I have not read.  

The other syllabary, hiragana, is probably inescapable when you have characters for lexical roots borrowed into a language with agglutinating syntax, which Chinese does not have.  It doesn’t help, either, that there were multiple waves of Chinese influence, at different times and from different groups on the mainland, in Japan over many hundreds of years.  So add to the 2 or 3 indigenous pronunciations from groups that clearly stayed close to home, the 3 or 4 or 5 borrowed forms from China, and it is a wonder anyone ever knows which pronunciation for anything should be used.  I always find it interesting when we get student applications for things, and the (very traditional and classically educated) chair of the selection committee circulates the applications, with an apology that he doesn’t know how the first names should be pronounced if there are not hiragana traces to indicate.  Having markers to indicate nominal or verbal forms as well as case or aspect should lessen the cognitive load while reading, of having to go a few characters downstream to back-parse what role the earlier characters were taking in the sentence.  Probably for some things like case or aspect, they couldn’t be disambiguated at all without the hiragana.  

I wish I were good enough at my day job to have the time or actually put in the effort to be a Japanophile, or anything else that would be interesting to really understand.

Best,

Eric



On Oct 13, 2020, at 11:31 AM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

We obviously have at least two Japanophiles here...

My (very limited) familiarity with Chinese Logographic written language and the inherited/derived Japanese Kanji  I was struck by how intrinsic the metaphorical nature of Ideograms are.   Pictograms are more "visually onomatapoeic" which is (more than) a nod to the perceptual grounding of language.  It seems that Logographic writing mixes Pictographic, Ideographic and even Rebus (phonetic loan words) as-needed, with what seems like a natural drift toward phonographic language/syllabaries (e.g. Katakana).   Of course, having metaphor-derangement-syndrome, I find metaphor everywhere and even more to the point of my own idiosyncratic perspective, the stacking or composition of metaphors evidenced in ideogrammatic compounds and the broad use of radicals to combine/modify/nuance ideograms.

I'd be curious if either of you (anyone really) has more insight into the way these written languages maintain the vestiges of their own evolution/development and hints for how people who use these languages might structure their thought similarly or differently to those who use entirely phonographic writing (all of the modern West?)

- Steve

On 10/13/20 8:42 AM, Prof David West wrote:
Carl,

Mentioning art and translation made me think of this book

The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, composed by the Ernest Fenollosa, edited by Ezra Pound after the author's death, 1918.

I frequently refer to it when confronting issues of cognition and language and culture; and as insight into why Whorf was right and why he was wrong.

You might enjoy it. 

davew


On Mon, Oct 12, 2020, at 9:45 PM, Carl Tollander wrote:
Dave,

Thanks, not there yet.    Somewhere between Zen and Shinto, anyhows.   

The test is a mirror, in the sense that it proposed a lot of photons in short order that I would not normally consider, which brought some opportunity for self-reflection.   A bunch of "gee, that's odd" moments.

Sort of like studying Japanese grammar might give some insights about the English language and the nature of translation.   One of the works that disabused me of western notions of Japanese "traditional" arts was Edith Grossman's "Why Translation Matters".  (note -- she doesn't talk about Japan at all) Respect as engagement rather than obeisance.   

C








On Mon, Oct 12, 2020 at 9:02 PM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

Carl is very Japanese and master of Drum Zen.

davew


On Mon, Oct 12, 2020, at 8:50 PM, Steve Smith wrote:

Carl -

Acknowledged.   The foreground/background thing is always tricky.   I don't mean to attribute any reality to "personal freedoms", yet somehow "not being an ass" is something *like* respecting others "personal freedoms", even though such are in some sense an illusion.   Perhaps someone can articulate this better than I have?

- Steve
Steve, 

You assume I have some fealty to the notion of "personal freedoms".   Perhaps that is unwarranted.   I just see no reason to be an ass.

>>I don't know you well Carl, but from what I do think I know, you are clearly *very* independent and *very* considerate of others and their personal freedoms.  That sounds pretty *l*ibertarian to me FWIW.

On Mon, Oct 12, 2020 at 10:18 AM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
Carl Tollander wrote:

-9,-8.1 
But I do think it would depend a bit on the day.
Oddly, never thought of myself as a libertarian.

I think some pretty strong *Fascists* co-opted the term "Libertarian" for themselves.   My experience with the *L*ibertarian self-identified is they seem to lean toward a virulent extremist willingness to *assert their will* on others under the guise of protecting *their will from subversion* .   When I was younger (more juiced on the hormones and rhetoric and appeal of competition?) I was more seduced by some of that.  Now it just makes me feel systemically ill.

I don't know you well Carl, but from what I do think I know, you are clearly *very* independent and *very* considerate of others and their personal freedoms.  That sounds pretty *l*ibertarian to me FWIW.

- Steve



On Mon, Oct 12, 2020 at 8:48 AM Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

There is another aspect of staying behind which puts more weight on maintaining local (e.g. family and childhood) relationships.   I don’t think this inclination is overtly authoritarian.   However, a strong desire to maintain a social fabric could lead to policing mechanisms for them, and that brings in (say) the church.  When a social network is more important than having any sort of purpose, weird things happen.   Wired has an article on some crazies up in Forks, Washington that is worth a skim. 

 


From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Monday, October 12, 2020 7:35 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Political compass teest


 

So this is metastasizing now, and there have been other decades when it wasn’t such a problem, or at least not as overt.

 

Is that due to demographic sorting?  In more prosperous (or even just earlier) times, enough people stayed near where they were born that cultures got some mix of preferences, and you didn’t have whole regions “submitting too much to the authorities in their lives”.  But when those who wanted out could get out, and did so systematically, the ones who stayed behind could create a tailored paradise for the preferences that had caused them to stay behind?




On Oct 12, 2020, at 10:19 AM, Roger Critchlow <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

 

On Sun, Oct 11, 2020 at 12:27 AM Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

There’s a page on the 2020 election where they claim, among other strange things, that Warren is a right-leaning authoritarian.   If that is true, which I doubt, it says to me politicians are mirroring the electorate in a very obscure way.   And I am pretty sure I am not far to the left of Bernie Sanders. 

 


From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Stephen Guerin
Sent: Saturday, October 10, 2020 8:39 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Political compass teest


 

ec=-5.75 & soc=-6.3

 

 

 

 

On Sat, Oct 10, 2020, 9:18 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

I’m more of a libertarian than Dave is?  Something MUST be wrong, here.

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 


From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Saturday, October 10, 2020 6:39 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Political compass teest


 

Econ left/right:      -0.88

Social Lib/Auth:     -6.1

 

davew

NOT a Libertarian

 

On Sat, Oct 10, 2020, at 5:56 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

Do we all agree at an insanely high level?  Then wtf have we been arguing about all these years.  Let’s wait until Glen and Dave take the test before we bury all our hatchets.

 

n

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Gary Schiltz

Sent: Saturday, October 10, 2020 5:29 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Political compass teest

 

I was pretty much dead center in the lower left quadrant, which was surprising to me. I would have thought I would be in the middle of the whole graph.

 

On Sat, Oct 10, 2020 at 4:52 PM George Duncan <[hidden email]> wrote:

Jon, I took it. I'm barely left on economics and strongly libertarian on social issues

 

George Duncan

Emeritus Professor of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University

See posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

Land: (505) 983-6895  

Mobile: (505) 469-4671

 

My art theme: Dynamic exposition of the tension between matrix order and luminous chaos.

 

"Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion."

From "Notes to myself on beginning a painting" by Richard Diebenkorn. 

"It's that knife-edge of uncertainty where we come alive to our truest power." Joanna Macy.


 

 

On Sat, Oct 10, 2020 at 3:22 PM jon zingale <[hidden email]> wrote:

I just took the political compass test and surprise surprise, I am a

left-libertarian.

 

Take the test here if you are interested:

 

 

 

 

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