Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 11:02:12 -0700 (PDT) From: Gary Kline <kline@tera.com> To: tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert) Cc: dmlb@ragnet.demon.co.uk, tlambert@primenet.com, nik@iii.co.uk, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG, itojun@itojun.org Subject: Re: internationalization Message-ID: <199806121802.LAA25291@athena.tera.com> In-Reply-To: <199806121619.JAA08857@usr02.primenet.com> from Terry Lambert at "Jun 12, 98 04:19:35 pm"
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According to Terry Lambert: > > > > The origins of Kanji as an ideogrammatic writing system owe more to > > > > the need for Imperial China to control the availability of persistent > > > > information available to Chinese Serfs in support of a feudal society > > > > than they do to their information density compared to alphabetic > > > > writing systems. > > > I've never consider this before or read this before, but it seems likely given the culture of ancient (imperial) China. If you examine ancient Egyptian society you'll find parallels. The ruling, educated classes-- including the scribes--didn not want the hieroglyphs to be readily understood. If `everyone' could read; if everyone had general access to knowledge and information there would have been major upsets. --Of course change was inevitable, and lookit what's happened here in the States: a large minority can't read; don't give a damn about it; would rather park themselves in front of a television and switch off whatever cortical neurons were left. gary kline PS: my ppp link to thought.org broke an hour ago so I've resub's to -hardware from this addr. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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