Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme
Pascal Bourguignon
spam at thalassa.informatimago.com
Tue Oct 7 23:12:22 EDT 2003
Tim Hochberg <tim.hochberg at ieee.org> writes:
> Pascal Bourguignon wrote:
> > Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk <qrczak at knm.org.pl> writes:
> >
> >>On Tue, 07 Oct 2003 21:59:11 +0200, Pascal Bourguignon wrote:
> [SNIP]
> >>A richer alphabet is often more readable. Morse code can't be read as fast
> >>as Latin alphabet because it uses too few different symbols. Japanese say
> >>they won't abandon Kanji because it's more readable as soon as you know it -
> >>you don't have to compose words from many small pieces which look alike
> >>but each word is distinct. Of course *too* large alphabet requires long
> >>learning and has technical difficulties, but Lisp expressions are too
> >>little distinctive for my taste.
> > Well, I would say that kanji is badly designed, compared to
> > latin
> > alphabet. The voyels are composed with consones (with diacritical
> > marks) and consones are written following four or five groups with
> > additional diacritical marks to distinguish within the groups. It's
> > more a phonetic code than a true alphabet.
> [SNIP]
>
> Admittedly, I found the above paragraph pretty hard to parse and my
> never stellar knowledge of Japanees has mostly evaporated over time,
> but I'm pretty sure you are talking about Hiragana (or Katakana), not
> Kanji. Japaneese has three alphabets, which they mix and match in
> ordinary writing. Kanji aren't phonetic at all, they're ideograms, and
> can typically be read at least two completely different ways depending
> on the context, making reading Japanese extra confusing for the non
> fluent.
Absolutely. My mistake, sorry. I wrote about katakana and that was
not the subject.
> A random web search supplies this basic descripion of Hiragana,
> Katakana and Kanji:
>
> http://www.kanjisite.com/html/wak/wak1.html
>
> -tim
>
--
__Pascal_Bourguignon__
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