An assessment of the Unicode standard

[Hendrik van Rooyen]

On Sunday 30 August 2009 02:20:47 John Machin wrote:
> On Aug 30, 8:46 am, r <rt8... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Take for instance the Chinese language with it's thousands of
> > characters and BS, it's more of an art than a language.  Why do we
> > need such complicated languages in this day and time. Many languages
> > have been perfected, (although not perfect) far beyond that of Chinese
> > language.
>
> The Chinese language is more widely spoken than English, is quite
> capable of expression in ASCII ("r tongzhi shi sha gua") and doesn't
> have those pesky it's/its problems.
>
> > The A-Z char set is flawless!
>
> ... for expressing the sounds of a very limited number of languages,
> and English is *NOT* one of those.

I suspect that the alphabet is not ideal for representing the sounds of _any_ 
language, and I would look for my proof in the plethora of things that we use 
when writing, other than the bare A-Z.   - Punctuation, diacritics...

But what really started me thinking, after reading this post of John's, read 
with Dennis'. - on the dissimilarity of the spoken and written Chinese - was 
the basic dichotomy of the two systems - a symbol for a sound vs a symbol for 
a word or an idea.

I know that when I read, I do not actually read the characters, I recognize 
words, and only fall back to messing with characters when I hit something 
unfamiliar.

So It would seem to me that r's "utopia" could sooner be realized if the 
former system were abandoned in favour of the latter. - and Horrors!  The 
language of choice would not be English!

Not that I agree that it would be a Utopia, whatever the language  - more like 
a nightmare of Orwellian proportions - because the language you get taught 
first, moulds the way you think.  And I know from personal experience that 
there are concepts that can be succinctly expressed in one language, that 
takes a lot of wordy handwaving to get across in another.  So diversity would 
be less, creativity would suffer due to lack of cross pollination, and 
progress would slow or stop.

- Hendrik