I'm lost. Michael, were you on one of your late night crack binges again?
I think one of the important points of the original thread was not simply the spatial issue of efficiency, but thumb labor as well.
Simple case in point: the word Canada, which goes beautifully into both writing systems. In Japanese it is 3 glyphs, in roman 6.
Heh.
> Now, a keitai screen serves up an interface optimized for presentation of
> Japanese. From the above discussion, you can guess what this will mean.
> You're not guaranteed proportional spacing (much less such niceties as
> kerning) so you might see unnecessary increases along the horizontal axis.
> And lines will be vertically sized and spaced for kanji legibility, not
> English, which can get by with less in that axis. Generally, a character
> cells sized for kanji will simply be bigger. Roman characters will jangle
> loosely around in them, glancing longingly at each other.
Is your point, simply put, that space is used more efficiently by a roman character set because its cell sizes are variable and
because a single glyph from the roman alphabet takes up less space than a single kana or kanji? True, but the point is moot.
You can't compare writing systems without factoring out grammar and phonology. The example above, Canada, is about is close as you
get to a pure head-to-head comparison of writing systems. And then even Japanese breaks even, if not wins on most cases. For the
remainder, a comparison is virtually pointless. Look at mountain and やまor山. Writing in Japanese here is more spatially
efficient, even with kana, but this is simply due to the arbitrary nature of a language's phonetic string for this particular word.
There is no logical impossibility that a writing system for language X be spatially compact while its grammar and orthography be
verbose. Don't mean to split hairs here, but what are we trying to compare, writing systems or communication systems?
Now even if we are going to be mushy with our categories and say we are comparing the spatial characteristics of the two languages
in general, then Japanese will win out in many, if not most, cases. Kanji obey an entirely different (and more efficient) spatial
logic than devices for spelling. I think you will not find many examples were the kanji takes up more space than the English word,
supposing that a typical kanji is roughly the same space as 2 or 3 roman characters. But then again there is no point in comparing
love with 愛 since love could have been l'amour.
If Japanese was written entirely in kana and the kana were full-width then your point makes sense. But Japanese is not entirely
written in kana, and if it was, the kana could all be represented by half-width cell sizes comparable to roman glyphs.
I feel like I am missing something here. か and ka - - sure the kana is a lot bigger than a single letter, but it is not equivalent
to one letter. It is a complex (actually two) phoneme.
Another very good point brought up earlier by Curt S. is that the roman set requires spaces between words. Dead, wasteful, space
where nothing happens.
Christian
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Received on Tue Dec 4 18:38:27 2001