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Like y’know folks, ... like folks y’know, ...
When a language with million word vocabulary goes down to 3 (or maybe 4, sad) 
Mircea
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wait till the human race reverts back to grunts, and finger painting on walls.
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I think a large part of it has already regressed to that point.
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Slacker007 wrote: finger painting on walls.
Emojis?
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Before we reinvented ideograms (a.k.a. emojis), it wasn't uncommon to hear people argue that our Western style of writing, representing concepts or ideas by 'word' symbols bearing no resemblance to any appearance of the concept/idea, is more 'sophisticated', as is is more 'abstract'. Ideogram based written languages are more 'primitive', as they do not represent the idea, only the 'thing'...
I don't think any linguist, by profession, would support anything like that, but I have heard quite a few amateurs with a mental need to fiercely defend their own culture / language argue that way. (You wouldn't believe the arguments native English speakers can bring forth to 'prove' that English, according to any measure, is a much better language than not only Far East ideogram based ones, but also any other Western language!)
Western culture (although some parts of it more than others) see Far East culture (although some parts of it more than others) as a serious threat, and use any opportunity to stigmatize and condemn it, blame it for everything evil, and to fight it. If we had still been holding text and word symbols in high esteem, I am convinced that we, in the political situation of today, would have been ridiculing major Far Eastern written languages for being so primitive that they need to draw pictures of what they want to communicate.
We lost that opportunity by introducing emojis into our own written language. There is a major difference, though: In ideogram languages with a history of several thousand years, the ideograms have been firmly established with quite exact meanings (or well understood ambiguities - but that is no different from our word symbols!). Our emojis are still at the cradle level: We have only a vague idea about how to shape each ideogram. Most people can only vaguely explain the use of a given ideogram: They can tell what it shows (as an image), but not the interpretation of it in various contexts.
Note that this occurs at a stage where a significant fraction of the population already has lost contact with the word symbols. If you ask for a word representation of the same emotions as the emoticons, they are at loss. So they neither can express themselves in the 'old' written language, nor in an ideogram language that is well defined and equally understood by different readers. So the writer must bark louder, repeating six or eight bark emoticons rather than a single one, to make sure the message gets through. Communicating by decibel levels, that is where we are at.
Maybe word symbols are better, after all. Not better than ideograms refines through thousand years, but better than emoticons.
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At least you broke your doctoral thesis into separate and logical paragraphs, instead of one long pile of thought vomit.
modified 11-Feb-21 16:16pm.
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Emojis were (re)invented as part of alphabetical languages when people stopped trying to use words in their proper context. This was either out of laziness or because in many cases their vocabulary had shrunk to such a level that they were incapable of using language correctly. They are not a sign of advancement, but of regression of language skills.
Alphabetical languages have no intrinsic advantage over ideogrammatic languages as communication methods - as long as ideograms are invented in a timely manner to describe new concepts. It is not necessarily easier to guess the meaning of an unfamiliar complex word in an alphabetical language that it is to guess the meaning of a complex ideogram - all that is required is language-specific knowledge of how words (or ideograms) are formed.
One way in which alphabetical languages are superior to ideogrammatic languages is the ease of learning. Any properly-taught first grader who has learnt his/her language's alphabet can read a newspaper meant for adults and at least attempt to pronounce the words, even if he/she does not understand them all. Try the same experiment with a Japanese, Chinese, or Korean schoolchild!
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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One experience coming a surprise to me: To a few of my native English speaking friends, the famous English is tough stuff[^] caused no problems whatsoever. They could read it out loud without stumbling, at the first try.
For both of them (all others had problems!), it turned out that they had gone to schools teaching words before teaching letters, learning words as integral units, to be understood in a context. Breaking the words into separate syllables and sounds, relating them to the individual letters, came much later.
These people had also, as kids, learned various conjugations and relationships to then roots of the words. So they could relate terms they knew to words they didn't yet know, but by structure, form or sound.
When you state "One way in which alphabetical languages are superior to ideogrammatic languages is the ease of learning", I am thinking: Yes. but in a very superficial way. When you teach a programming apprentice, you must teach him the difference between 0 and 1, between true and false (in the logical sense, not the moral one). And then: What now?
So you learn the bits and bytes/letters. Fair enough. But no wise man's knowledge has been limited to his familiarity with ASCII encoding. At which point on the ladder of enlightenment is that alphabet understanding that you strive for?
If a Far-East child must learn five thousand concepts/ideas (/ideographs) to read a newspaper, but here, in Western communities, you conclude that learning 26 character symbols is good enough to read and comprehend a similar newspaper...
Of course not! Any reader knowing only the bit or byte encodings, but haven't learned the semantics of the higher level symbols cannot make use of them for a higher understanding. In our culture, understanding characters as a basic block for the way we represent information, as words, but characters combined into words is not the only possible way of representing it.
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I have a friend from China that's a professor in microbiology.
She cannot read a thesis in her own subject if it would be written in Chinese.
Whenever she encounters a new logogram that she has never seen before, there is no easy way to know what it means. Nor does she have a clue how it's pronounced.
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That is certainly no different from word based languages!
I frequently encounter word symbols completely unknown to me. Often, I have no clue how the term is pronounced (read out loud English is tough stuff[^] if you don't get my point!).
In the academic, English-speaking society, you are expected to master a huge vocabulary of several ten thousands of words - or, if you like: word symbols. If you master several ten thousands of ideogram symbols, you will probably be able to get far in your professional field, regardless of culture.
I can easily imagine Chinese propagandists ridiculing Westeners for not knowing the meaning and/or pronounciation of some professional term. You have to learn the terminology to read it. There is no principal difference between character/word based terminology or ideogram based terminology.
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Oh so you have met my daughters boyfriend!
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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Have you been on the Internet lately, especially any of the social media sites?
Software Zen: delete this;
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So ... a Spice girls song then?
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I love you, you love me,
Now we have a melody
Mircea
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In my youth, popular music was ridiculed for these primitivistic 'love, love, love' repetitions.
Maybe Norwegian culture was early in pointing out that endless repetitions of 'Glory, glory, glory' or 'Holy, holy, holy' (and several other mantras) were fully recognized in numerous musical works touted as Elevated Cultural Expressions.
I seriously suspect that in essential parts of Western Culture, even today it would be inappropriate to draw parallels between 'love, love, love' and 'Glory, glory, glory'.
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aren't you already there?
To err is human to really elephant it up you need a computer
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y'know, I know how you feel.
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Much as is listening to people who cannot construct a sentence without adding 'like' every third word.
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Chris Maunder wrote: It's driving me insane.
Count 'em. After the meeting/presentation, hand them your count and leave.
I found that it works better than interrupting them and pointing it out 
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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At Microsoft in the old times whenever they had a meeting with Bill Gates, they assigned one person to be the f*** counter.
The less f***s the better the presentation went.
My First BillG Review – Joel on Software[^]
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Those are filler words; when I took English classes in school I used a lot of them.
It is not something conscious and it may annoy the f*ck out of of your audience, like y'know. It may hurt their cause.
..true story; learned what filler is as a kid in school, interrupted anyone explaining so. It's better to just count and give a note after the session. Shows you been distracted, without being too rude. It's still rude, but less.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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"Y'know what I'm sayin'?" At the end of the majority of someone's sentences wears on my patience.
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I can't stand webinars as such.
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Y'know, uhm... like, there are a few good ones out there, I hear. Y'know what I'm sayin'?
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Uhhhhmmmmmmmm.
It was only in wine that he laid down no limit for himself, but he did not allow himself to be confused by it.
― Confucian Analects: Rules of Confucius about his food
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