Book from the ground
"Xu Bing spent seven years gathering materials, experimenting, revising, and arranging thousands of pictograms to construct this narrative. The result is a readable story without words recording 24 hours in the day of the life of a typical urban white-collar worker. Using an exclusively visual language, the text could be published anywhere without translation"--Back cover.
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- That's not actually true. When MacArthur tried to get rid of the use of Chinese characters in Japanese writing during the post-WW2 occupation, he backed off when it was embarrassingly pointed out that Japan had a higher literacy rate than the US, despite having less of an investment in state schools at the time. Studies have shown that it does not take more time or effort for a child to learn to read and write Chinese or Japanese (assuming those are their native spoken languages) than for an American student to learn to read/write English. It may defy what you think you know as common sense, but it is a replicable observation.
The reason for this is that nobody except little children actually read by sounding out individual letters of words. That would be too much for the human mind to process in real time. You learn to read by recognizing particular clusters of lines on a paper or screen as having semantic meaning, and your brain translates that directly. The imlpiactoin is the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. (Did you read that OK?)
So essentially, you and a Chinese person both put in the same amount of effort to learn the same number of squiggly lines on paper as having semantic meaning, and memorizing a mapping of squiggles to words. It's just that in English the pronunciation is emphasized in the writing, whereas in Chinese it is mainly the meaning of the word that is focused on. But given that in this age most of our communication is through text which may never even be read aloud, it does make one wonder if the Chinese had the right idea all along.
But if so, rather than use a 3000 year old writing system with a lot of inherited historical baggage, why not start afresh? Keep the same basic concept (digital pictures in squares representing atomistic units of meaning, aligned in sequential order according to a grammar), but allow the pictures to make full benefit of today's digital display and font rendering technology. The logical end result of this is, I believe, emoji. Or something very close to it / evolved from it.
To get an idea of what I mean, you might want to check out Xu Bing's "Book from the Ground", which is a very readable book written in emoji, or something close to it. You can read about his work here:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/emojis-comics-novel-futu...
- I think the book "Book from the Ground" by Xu Bing shows what can be done with an emoji-only format. I found the book on a whim at a used book store, and found it a fascinating "read".
Excerpts: http://asiasociety.org/blog/asia/always-pioneer-artist-xu-bi...
- "writing, but for people who can't write"
Reminds me of Book from the Ground[1], a novel written entirely in pictograms. The intent is to write a story that any person - even someone who's illiterate - can read. I should mention that it can really only be made legible to sighted people, which is a shortcoming it shares with many attempts to create programming languages for non-programmers. That said it's remarkably successful. But the story is extremely simple, a side effect of the author's choice to use a form of expression that cuts expressivity to the bone. As an exploration and mental exercise it's fascinating. But I don't think it heralds a major change in how we communicate nowadays, even across language boundaries.
[1] http://asiasociety.org/blog/asia/always-pioneer-artist-xu-bi...
