Oh boy oh boy
komninos
er, although I go along with some of what you say I would suggest it is not
as simple as you portray it. In the first place, only a very small number of
characters in Classical Chinese script are simply iconographic in the way
you describe. Essentially, the characters represent words, in a literary
language that was almost agrammatic, totally monosyllabic (unlike, I
understand, spoken Chinese) and deluged with homophones.
Korean might be interesting in this context, as I understand it has both a
Chinese based script and a phonetic script.
Interestingly, there are those who see the future development of English as
a written language as promising to be curiously similar to the course
Chinese took: English script after all, although alphabetic, is not all that
phonetic, preserving as it does, almost as part of its meanings, past
pronunciations. I think the idea is that that English will become
alphabetic-etymological rather than alphabetic-phonetic.
Sorry for the crude brevity of this, but the hour grows late at the end of a
long day here.
david
----- Original Message -----
From: komninos zervos <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, January 27, 2001 10:51 PM
Subject: Re: Silent reading
> i thought you are joking because chinese is not a phonetic but an
> iconographic language.ie the spoken language is different froooom the
> written language, unlike alphabetic language which allows it to be sounded
> without necessarily knowing what it means.
>
> i assume with iconographic languages the symbols have to be interpreted
> first before they can be verbalised into speech.
>
> ie. given a picture of a man, a road and a house, i have to visualise
> first, then express in spoken language my interpretation, a man took a
> journey and arrived at a house.
>
> so that would mean reading chinese silently is the only way you can read
> it, since the characters don't have spoken equivalents.
>
> illich and saunders, the alphabetization of civilisation, and ong's
orality
> come to mind as texts that have dealt with this topic.
> regards
> komninos
> komninos's cyberpoetry site http://student.uq.edu.au/~s271502
> cyberpoet@slv site http://www.experimedia.vic.gov.au/cyberpoet/
> komninos zervos, tel. +61 7 5552 8872
> lecturer in cyberStudies,
> school of arts,
> gold coast campus,
> griffith university,
> pmb 50, gold coast mail centre
> queensland, 9726
> australia.
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