Re: Your vote on a common global language

From: Lee Sau Dan (danlee_at_informatik.uni-freiburg.de)
Date: 12/05/04 

Date: 05 Dec 2004 22:25:20 +0800

>>>>> "Miguel" == Miguel Cruz <mnc@admin.u.nu> writes:

    Miguel> Now count the strokes in the Chinese character versus the
    Miguel> strokes in the corresponding English word. Make sure you
    Miguel> take a fair number of words, as extremely basic words like
    Miguel> "mother" will tend to favor Chinese.

That's still unfair, as you don't have a fair way of counting strokes.
One stroke can be very very very long (Haven't you played with
one-stroke pictures?) and can take a long time to complete.

Maybe, you would want to measure the amount of ink (or number of
pixels in a rasterized computer font). But there is still a
difficulty: what size? I'm sure it consumes more ink to write
"mother" (in either language) on a poster-size ***, than to write it
on a namecard, assuming that you scale it large enough to occupy the
available space on the ***.

For similar legibility (assuming the 'normal' sized used in plain text
in newspaper articles), I think Chinese characters saves more ink than
the English script in general. But again, a fair comparison is
impossible, as different languages employ (or need) different
expressions to express the same idea. The verbosity can vary pretty
greatly. (Remember, Chinese doesn't mark tense nor plural. Isn't
that unfair for the English translation?) No translation is 100%
perfect, I remind you.

    Miguel> And also include a time penalty for the additional
    Miguel> precision required to make the Chinese characters actually
    Miguel> legible.

I don't think it is more difficult than making sure you write the 6
letters "mother" legibly. I write both words (Chinese and English for
"mother") in approx. the same amount of time. 

-- 
Lee Sau Dan                     §õ¦u´°                          ~{@nJX6X~}
E-mail: danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee