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Re: USAGE: Language revival

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Wednesday, November 24, 1999, 5:53
On Tue, 23 Nov 1999 12:58:59 -0500, "David G. Durand"
<david@...> wrote:

>There are reasons to preserve writing systems that are hard to learn, =
but
>that doesn't make them easy. There are also hints that the iconicity of >non-phonetic writing systems like Han characters actually affect reading >speed positively. The only measure of this that I've seen is in film >subtitles: I have read (and casual inspection confirms) that they are >longer (in words) and displayed for a shorter time than English =
subtitles.
>Assuming that filmmakers tune the quantity and timing of subtitles for >comfortable comprehension by their audience, this confirms the notion =
that
>people can read Chinese faster.
I can definitely read Japanese kanji faster than kana. Well, those few kanji that I actually recognize. But it takes probably about as much = effort to recognize the character for "murasaki" as it does to recognize the syllable "mu". Actually, some of the less frequently used kana take = longer for me to recognize than kanji. On the other hand, this is offset by the fact that each character has two or more context-dependent = pronunciations. If I knew more than a couple hundred kanji, it might also take longer to distinguish between similar-looking ones. And I'm not sure how it would work with a language like Chinese with one syllable per character. --=20 languages of Kolagia---> = +---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/languages.html>--- Thryomanes /"If all Printers were determin'd not to print = any (Herman Miller) / thing till they were sure it would offend no = body, moc.oi @ rellimh <-/ there would be very little printed." -Ben = Franklin