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Comment by Xophmeister | Hacker News Reader

Writing is a technology invented to help practically disseminate information over time and space. It's a good invention -- arguably one of our best -- regardless of the minutiae of alphabets vs. syllabaries vs. ideographs, etc. However, one shouldn't confound it with the thought patterns of speech and the mechanisms required to produce and process language.

Chinese is no different to English (or any other language) in that respect. Do you visualise the shape of the word "bee" when asked to think how to spell it? I doubt it. The act of writing is completely removed from the linguistic process.

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Chinese is different, regarding homographs. Written English forces a lot of disambiguation of a purely abstract kind (English homograph collisions don't usually reflect associations, just random collisions) else you can't cope with the homographs. Ideogram collisions or overlaps are far more meaningful, generally non-co-incidental. (Terrific for poetry.)

Examining all this, some while ago, a Chinese professional philosopher and I concluded that this had indeed had some real influence on the two cultures and thinking. This point isn't about visualization per se, but instead the fact that ideograms combine concepts, not sounds. Thanks to its extreme borrowing and therefore an abundance of synonyms, English is no doubt the most extreme example of a language with random homonym and homograph collisions, forcing both listener and reader to make constant choices between abstract (unassociated) options. That's not generally how the human mind works, brains are association engines. So it's a good bet that the fact that English is the language of science and technology (for now) is not entirely coincidental.

This is no bar to progress for China today, however, to the extent that the hànzì alphabet is adopted for text.

How did you conclude this? Through experimentation or reasoning?

I don't think "good bets" are conclusions. The professor and I were comparing different thinking patterns. He had the most exemplars having moved to North American within a year or two of the conversation.

> So it's a good bet that the fact that English is the language of science and technology (for now) is not entirely coincidental.

I have to disagree on this. For me it seems that the world politics was the major, if not only, reason why English took over French and German in these fields (too).

I can't interpret this. Do you mean the supremacy of the english navy due to the improvements in iron forging that gave the english iron cannons first around the time of the Spanish Armada? That world politics?

It's true that Germany had better rates of literacy 500 years ago.

No, it is because the British Empire spanned a quarter of the globe and the Americans won World War II. No other language has had the advantage of being the language of two world superpowers with such vast geopolitical influence spanning over 200 years and huge expanses of the globe. French was the language of international diplomacy, but the French language never had the unparalleled reach that English had (and still has to this day).

In terms of technology, the Industrial Revolution and American scientific achievements were important drivers too. German was the language of science, but when the vast number of new findings are published in English (due to the sheer volume of American/British scientific output), its decline was inevitable.

Those iron cannons, together with a wealth of Elizabethan technical innovations, are a VERY large reason why Britain spanned the globe. The advantage of world-dominance didn't precede innovation, it resulted from it. Better weapons, better tactics, better hull designs for ships, better mining techniques and on and on and on.

The U.S. won WWII with no small amount of accumulated Western technology and technological advance. What WWII did do was allow the US (and Russia, but not Britain) to simply seize every German patent in existence without compensation, afterward. If you research Germany technological history you might have a chance to overturn my hypothesis. But the industrial revolution didn't begin there. In any case you'd have to do a lot more homework than you have so far. Japan was a latecomer, and can't count as a counterexample.

English as the primary language of technology and science long predates WWII. The exception might be chemistry (German.)

> So it's a good bet that the fact that English is the language of science and technology (for now) is not entirely coincidental.

Unless it was the intricacy of English spelling that finally drove Hitler over the edge, resulting in the US rising as the sole superpower while France and Germany crashed and burned, I'm not sure how they could be possible related.

Repairing a clock, or creating a weaving machine requires thought with an underlying simplicity (and definitiveness) to its logic - you have to take simple facts and relationships (without rich associations) that can piled on top of each other and yield precise calculations. Poetry is a great preparation for many things, but probably not clock design or repair.

Math, logic, mechanics - what's so different about these tasks is that they're simple-to-complex. But because our minds are association-machines, they're all hard for us. Chess gets you closer to that sort of thinking than Go does (it's a more intuitive game.) However Chinese chess has a long history and isn't much different than Western chess, so chess hasn't been a Western advantage. And a language with an alphabet and tons of homonyms strips away many of the rich associations present, say, in the written Chinese language. I'm going to guess you haven't experienced and can't imagine the difference, or perhaps the notion that the Chinese way might be richer or superior in any respect.

Compare many of the mind-bending "reasonings" of Medieval thinkers from a time when Latin was the medium of scholarship. So many of these, which were taken very seriously at the time, are just stupifying to moderns - because the arguments are so easily taken over by coincidental associations which to a modern person have no logical importance at all, of any kind. Latin borrowed, but never as freely as English did, and by Medieval times was a pared-down, rationalized version of Ancient Latin. No forest of homographs.

Another pretty well-known hypothesis holds that english common law, which in contrast with so many other top-down legal traditions, necessitated the logical reconciliation of decision across many circumstances, etc, over hundreds of years, reinforced the mechanical bent of mind. I guess you'd find it plumb crazy too.

Echoing abecedarious, I do visualize the letters. In fact, I've read in some books about different types of language learners that there's a category/subset of visualizers that can only visualize the letters. (Not everyone is a visualizer, either.) It noted that these people are often very good at spelling and spelling bees.

Interestingly enough this seems to play out in various ways for me -- I can't remember people's names unless I remember how they're spelled, and often cannot recall the correct pronunciation if it's somewhat uncommon. And because my knowledge of Chinese characters is middling at best, I'm unable to remember Chinese names since I can't visualize and know the characters used!

EDIT: I should note I'm practically aphantasic, and that my visualizations are closer to being kinesthetic spatializations.

I do visualize "bee", don't you? Maybe relevant: many people notice puns that I don't, perhaps because I think of words more visually? And back in school, spelling tests were an easy 100% every time with no study; I was more likely to not know the pronunciation.

> Do you visualize the shape of the word "bee"

Not sure about Chinese, it is supposedly much more phonetic, but the Japanese unquestionably do visualize words to the point where they on occasion are absolutely dumbfounded by words that are just slightly out of context and unless you tell them what kanji you meant they won't be able to easily associate pronounced words to meanings. In my opinion this is so deeply ingrained that society and language subtly changed in a way to alleviate the embarassment from misunderstandings paradoxically by making the already highly context sensitive language vague while also placing the responsibility of interpretation (but at the same time also allowing for some generous amount of flexibility) on the listener. The result - in my opinion - is a spoken language that is in a way tangibly insufficient for _practical_ dissemination of information exactly because of this constant need for visualization.

You can find the same thing in written language where writing words just in the phonetic alphabet renders it completely unreadable without the symbology. In return having the words rendered in the logography frees the mind from having to visualize and is performing much better as a coduit for information dissemination (with the small caveat that the spoken language already changed to include the various ambiguities)

In the end, while you don't necessarily visualize the image of a bee or the shape of the _phonetic_ spelling of the be, you do visualize the placeholder character for bee. (BTW interestingly, I don't think there is a separate word for bee and wasp in japanese, so naturally there is no difference perceived)

> The act of writing is completely removed from the linguistic process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonocentrism

I was under the impression that Chinese characters were created as part of religious rituals and originally had only very vague meanings.

I'm sorry, but that sounds like something that Athanasius Kircher[1] (who created a fascinating but completely off-the-wall translation system for Egyptian hieroglyphics[2]) would say.

As far as I know, Chinese writing likely followed the same path as Sumerian and Egyptian hieroglyphs (both of which, IIRC, have well-attested archaeological evidence): originating as markings for inventory-like purposes (a drawing of two penguins => this shipment contains two penguins) and then expanding into recording spoken language.

There is a complicating factor, AFAIK, in that the earliest known form of Chinese writing, the oracle bone script used to write on bones for divination purposes, already has clear meaning as words and is possibly traceable through to modern characters.[3][4]

On the other hand, as well, "had only very vague meanings" seems to be the initial take on every untranslated writing system: Chinese, hieroglyphics, Mayan, Minoan/Mycenaean, etc.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, I recommed Umberto Eco's book, The Search for the Perfect Language.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athanasius_Kircher#Egyptology

[2] https://publicdomainreview.org/2013/05/16/athanasius-kircher...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#History

[4] http://www.ancientscripts.com/chinese.html

Edit: I just got to digging around and remembered that the cover of John DeFrancis' The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy has the same phrase in several forms of Chinese:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7f/Defrancis.jpg

The top row, IIRC, is oracle bone script, the third is modern, simplified Hanzi, and the bottom is pinyin. The phrase is "Chinese Language", roughly.

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