Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ginosko!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ctrsol!cica!iuvax!rutgers!columbia!cs!d-yang From: d-yang@cs.columbia.edu (David Yang) Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng Subject: Re: Re^2: What to know & universal icons Summary: Chinese radicals Message-ID: <345@cs.columbia.edu> Date: 24 Sep 89 18:46:37 GMT References: <768@cogsci.ucsd.EDU> <3490@rtech.rtech.com> <446@uwslh.UUCP> Distribution: comp.cog-eng Organization: Columbia University Department of Computer Science Lines: 39 (preface: The following is based on what I know from experiences with my (warning?) parents, who speak and write Chinese, and a few years of classes plus informal learning.) In article <446@uwslh.UUCP>, lishka@uwslh.UUCP (Brain-fried after too much hacking) writes: > No. *Written* Chinese is composed of tens of thousands of > "characters" (i.e. symbols). Most of the time, these characters have I believe Robert Brady was referring to the radicals that make up the tens of thousands of characters. The radicals do give hints in meaning (like knowing the roots of words) and pronunciation and help in both memorizing characters and telling someone how to write a character, but the translation is still non-trivial. Also, though this may not be absolutely necessary, it seems that the icons people are thinking of are hopefully something almost anyone would approximate if asked to come up with an icon for the same thing. But Chinese characters still seem to be just memorized. > Furthermore, whereas current icons graphically represent ideas > with fairly "understanable" pictures, Japanese/Chinese characters do > not pictorally represent their respective ideas anymore. Even though This is true-- actually, I'm not that sure the original characters were all that understandable. The character for big (da1) was supposed to represent a big man, which doesn't seem inherently universal. > I prefer icons that are not tied to *any language*. Certainly > all icons are somehow tied to some culture(s). I do not think using > Japanese/Chinese characters as "standard" icons would work, although > it is an interesting idea. I agree-- e.g., one might be able to pick up that a big man represents "big," but I think this requires some knowledge of the way Chinese words are built up to know that the character didn't mean, say, "adult." And I think you might still have problems with the meanings of symbols in different contexts. David d-yang@cs.columbia.edu