OT: Linguistics [Was: Cobol work?]

"Judson McClendon" <judmc@sunvaley0.com> wrote in message
news:zqT4f.35459$Lp.18470@bignews5.bellsouth.net...
> And it has been proven that humans do better with letter based languages
> than with pictogram type languages, which were abandoned by everybody but
> Asians long ago.

"Proven" in the formal sense of the word? Probably not, given the
vagueness of "do better", but I'd still be interested to hear/read about any
research done in comparing alphabetic languages versus ideographic languages
and their effects on human cognition.

I don't really "like" ideographic languages; they require far too much
memorization in my opinion. That being said, ideographic texts seem to allow
for extremely fast reading speeds. Consider the above paragraph in English.
It consists of two two sentences (one short and one longer) and 258 English
characters. Read at a relaxed pace, I'd imagine it would take a typical
English reader 5 or 6 seconds.

The same sentence translated to Japanese might be around 130 Japanese
characters, and could probably read in about 2 or 3 seconds by a typical
native Japanese reader, again at a relaxed pace. My Japanese is not even at
the elementary level yet, but I am often amazed at how fast caption flies by
on Japanese television shows. When watching these shows with my Japanese
friends, I often protest "How the hell could anyone possibly read all that?"
causing them all to stare at me in astonishment, for they had all read the
text with no problem at all.


> Some indication of this particular aptitude of the brain for lettered
> languages can be seen in that the following can be fairly easily read:
>
> -----------------------------
> I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The
> phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde
> Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the
> olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit
> pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a
> porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by
> istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? Yaeh and I awlyas thought
> slpeling was ipmorantt !!!! (evne befro slpel ckech)
> -----------------------------
> --

I've seen some varations of this text, but this is one of the most
impressive examples (to me anyway). I was really astonished I could decypher
"uesdnatnrd", though I wonder if "phaonmneal" was a "cheat" in the sense
that the 'h' followed the 'p'. Would it have been as easy to decypher if the
'h' and 'p' were non-adjacent? E.g. "paaehmnnol"?

I suppose a good test to ensure that the above example wasn't "carefully
crafted" is to write a program to take any plain text file and do the
shuffling itself, to really verify if you can read English text with little
difficulty, as long as the "first char/last char" invariant still holds.

- Oliver

Oliver Wong wrote:
>
> "Judson McClendon" <judmc@sunvaley0.com> wrote in message
> news:zqT4f.35459$Lp.18470@bignews5.bellsouth.net... 
>
>     "Proven" in the formal sense of the word? Probably not, given the
> vagueness of "do better", but I'd still be interested to hear/read about a
ny
> research done in comparing alphabetic languages versus ideographic languag
es
> and their effects on human cognition.
>


I read SOMEHWERE, at SOME TIME, that it was ironic that GUI and icons
had become so popular because the originators (the Xerox group?) had
come to the conclusion that text-based choices were more easily
understood.  If I could tell you the source of this I would.  As it is,
it ancedotally supports the above assertion.

PL

> I read SOMEHWERE, at SOME TIME, that it was ironic that GUI and icons
> had become so popular because the originators (the Xerox group?) had
> come to the conclusion that text-based choices were more easily
> understood.  If I could tell you the source of this I would.  As it is,
> it ancedotally supports the above assertion.

Words are much better if you don't recognise the icon.  For example
Windows XP completely changed everything requiring relearning (which I
avoid wherever possible) and Vista probably changes them all again.

Personally I really like KDE 3.4 where the 'icons' are actually
previews so a document 'icon' is the first few words of the text of the
documents - hover the mouse and you see a miniture first page preview.

On Mon, 17 Oct 2005 21:18:15 GMT, "Oliver Wong" <owong@castortech.com>
wrote:

>    The big problem Japanese tend to have is with names (e.g. family names)
.
>Kanjis usually have multiple pronounciations with different associated
>meanings (sort of like homonyms in English). When these kanjis are used for
>communication, you can usually tell which meaning (and thus which
>pronounciation) to use via context, but when these Kanjis are used for
>names, you can't rely on the sequence of kanjis to have any meaning, so you
>can't use context to figure out what the pronounciation should be.

Names have this problem in quite a few languages, as families move
from one culture to another either in space or in time.

On 17 Oct 2005 19:56:13 -0700, "Richard" <riplin@Azonic.co.nz> wrote:

>Words are much better if you don't recognise the icon.  For example
>Windows XP completely changed everything requiring relearning (which I
>avoid wherever possible) and Vista probably changes them all again.

I've experienced the same thing.   But I suppose icons are better when
you don't recognize the word.

In article <ryU4f.40597$ir4.6791@edtnps90>, "Oliver Wong" <owong@castortech.com> writes:[co
lor=darkred]
>
>     The big problem Japanese tend to have is with names (e.g. family names
).
> Kanjis usually have multiple pronounciations with different associated
> meanings (sort of like homonyms in English). When these kanjis are used fo
r
> communication, you can usually tell which meaning (and thus which
> pronounciation) to use via context, but when these Kanjis are used for
> names, you can't rely on the sequence of kanjis to have any meaning, so yo
u
> can't use context to figure out what the pronounciation should be.[/color]

Also, names sometimes use archaic (in the sense of "stricken from the
language by the Occupation government after WWII") pronounciations
for some radicals and kanji, or kanji that are themselves archaic.
(Archaic or rare kanji - ones that aren't part of the standard set of
about 2000 - show up once in a while in ordinary text as well.)

That's why in printed Japanese you occasionally kanji with furigana -
hiragana or katakana (the two syllabaries) written in small type above
or beside the kanji to tell the reader how it's pronounced.  Furigana
is also used in texts for children who haven't mastered all their kanji
yet, and I've seen it used to actually replace one word with another.

I think that in that last case a character was speaking to herself and
referred to her father-in-law; the term "father-in-law" was written
using the kanji for the formal word, but it had furigana for "otousan",
literally "father".  I believe the reader is supposed to understand that
she *said* "father" but was referring to her father-in-law.  The kanji
represented the concept and the furigana its sound-image.

That would be a tough concept to convey economically with a phonemic
writing system, since the point of such systems (pace Derrida) is to
represent speech.  That anecdote - though it proves nothing - does
suggest how logographic/ideographic writing systems can have higher
information entropy than phonemic ones.

--
Michael Wojcik                  michael.wojcik@microfocus.com

Advertising Copy in a Second Language Dept.:
Tapestry of the encounting and the farewell, the birth and the death.
You can hear the human being's song running through the 100 years.
-- Squaresoft

In article <ybU4f.40588$ir4.14395@edtnps90>, "Oliver Wong" <owong@castortech.com> writes:[c
olor=darkred]
>
> My Japanese is not even at
> the elementary level yet, but I am often amazed at how fast caption flies 
by
> on Japanese television shows. When watching these shows with my Japanese
> friends, I often protest "How the hell could anyone possibly read all that
?"
> causing them all to stare at me in astonishment, for they had all read the
> text with no problem at all.[/color]

I sympathize - my Japanese has never been good enough for me to read
subtitles or film credits, though I occasionally catch something as
they fly by.

This reminded me of a developer I had working for me some years back.
He was fresh out of college with a major in physics and a minor in
Chinese.  We were in the habit of watching kung fu movies (in half-
hour or so segments) in a conference room during lunch.  Many of the
films we got were subtitled in Chinese (dialogue was typically
Cantonese, and there's a large Mandarin-speaking market for these
movies), and either dubbed into English, or subtitled in English as
well as Chinese (so there were two lines of subtitles running along
the bottom of the frame).

He could sometimes follow the dialogue in both languages simultaneously,
and was highly entertained at just how different they were.

(For that matter, we had one film - "Duel to the Death" - with both
English dubbing and subtitles.  From different translations.  Gave
the film a whole new dimension.)

--
Michael Wojcik                  michael.wojcik@microfocus.com

Any average educated person can turn out competent verse.  -- W. H. Auden

On 18 Oct 2005 13:50:43 GMT, mwojcik@newsguy.com (Michael Wojcik)
wrote:

>He could sometimes follow the dialogue in both languages simultaneously,
>and was highly entertained at just how different they were.


Turn on subtitling in English or closed captioning in English (similar
but not identical text), in an English language DvD and note the
differences between the dialog.

Richard wrote:
> Personally I really like KDE 3.4 where the 'icons' are actually
> previews so a document 'icon' is the first few words of the text of the
> documents - hover the mouse and you see a miniture first page preview.

Do you use Konq much for file maintenance?  Maybe it's just the way I
learned, but I still end up using the shell for most of that stuff.
Maybe I just need to learn about its features.  I had noticed that the
icons were thumbnails (for pictures) or had text in them (for text
files) - even PDFs, HTML, and XML files give a preview.  Quite ...

Under Windows, my shortcut to start the command prompt has the tool tip
"When you need to get things done NOW!"  :)


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> Do you use Konq much for file maintenance?

I use Midnight Commander for all development work and working in the
development system.