if the discussion is about how well japanese is suited for mails/messages
on keitais, i don't really think that emacs book is a good reference.
formal japanese like the one used in books isn't compact, but a typical
keitai message would be written in less formal and more compact japanese.
and that can be pretty compact compared to english...
typical sentence in everyday mobile messaging:
where are you now?
would be in formal jp:
(<name> ha) ima doko ni imasuka?
which is long, but in a keitai message (like in casual conversation) would
boil down to
ima doko?
which is 3 characters on screen.
you can play around with alot of 'typical' sentences like that ("do you
want to go and eat?", "where should we meet?", etc) and get simmilar results.
At 17:51 04.12.2001 +0900, you wrote:
> It seems we've got another thread going about how wonderfully suited the
>Japanese writing system is to the small screen.
>
> This argument may have merit.
>
> But not because Japanese text is so much more economical. Because it
>isn't, from what I can see.
<cut cut>
> Taking any pure-Japanese/pure-English paragraph-pair at random, I find that
>the Japanese and the English consume almost exactly the same amount of space
>on the page. Without applying a millimeter-resolution ruler, I couldn't see
>a difference.
<cut cut>
> Like we don't have enough holy wars already.
>
>-michael turner
>leap@gol.com
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Received on Tue Dec 4 15:11:53 2001