http://grandtextauto.org/2005/12/01/dac-2005-session-4b/ A group blog about computer narrative, games, poetry, and art. Thu, 30 Sep 2010 22:43:57 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.2 http://grandtextauto.org/2005/12/01/dac-2005-session-4b/comment-page-1/#comment-77473 mark Thu, 01 Dec 2005 18:53:21 +0000 http://grandtextauto.org/2005/12/01/dac-2005-session-4b/#comment-77473 Well this topic could take up entire essays on its own (and has), but the distinction between ideographic and "alphanumeric" writing systems quoted above seems somewhat simplistic. Of course they are clearly not identical, but upon further study they are not wholly dissimilar either. Much psychological research concludes that even alphabet-based languages are mostly read by fluent speakers in the same way that ideographic languages are---by recognizing the shapes of known words as atomic units, not by separately perceiving individual letters (the latter is someone only someone just learning to read, or encountering an unfamiliar word, would have to do). Writing the two is a bit less similar, but there are still similarities---ideograms are built up out of their constitutent strokes, which even have a standard order they should be written in (or typed on a computer). Well this topic could take up entire essays on its own (and has), but the distinction between ideographic and “alphanumeric” writing systems quoted above seems somewhat simplistic. Of course they are clearly not identical, but upon further study they are not wholly dissimilar either. Much psychological research concludes that even alphabet-based languages are mostly read by fluent speakers in the same way that ideographic languages are—by recognizing the shapes of known words as atomic units, not by separately perceiving individual letters (the latter is someone only someone just learning to read, or encountering an unfamiliar word, would have to do). Writing the two is a bit less similar, but there are still similarities—ideograms are built up out of their constitutent strokes, which even have a standard order they should be written in (or typed on a computer).

]]>