At 19:28 22/08/2003 -0400, Bill Ward wrote:
The characteristics below make [Chinese] very computer friendly unlike Arabic which has three different forms of each letter -- beginning, middle, and end of word. Bill
On Fri, 22 Aug 2003 20:31:55 +0100 Keith Hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
writes:
There are no words of more than one syllable and every word has only one form. It proceeds by means of subject and predicate -- that's all -- and explicated by means of metaphors.
Fascinating -- what you say about Arabic. I didn't know that. But I must say that I love the Arabic calligraphy in its different variations. But I made a discovery of my own concerning written Arabic when I was in Istanbul some three or four years ago. In the Blue Dome I heard the voice of a muezzin reciting the Qoran and then came across him in an alcove kneeling in front of his script and microphone. He was reciting it in a beautiful way (he had the most marvellous tenor voice) and I ventured to have a look at his script when he'd finished. I noticed some interesting dashes at high, medium and low levels adjacent to the words here and there and asked him about these (we conversed in sign language, of course, being mutually incomprehensible!) which I suspected were simple intonation marks. He confirmed this, and he gave me a master class there and then! It was only months later that the penny dropped and I realised that these marks were very similar to the pitch marks (neumes) of the music of the Jewish Cantors and the earliest liturgical music of the Christian church. This later became formalised in the notation book written by Englishman, Robert de Handlo, in the 14th century (after whom I named my music publishing business). So, we not only have the Islamic scholars to thank for having translated the ancient Greek writers and then reintroducing them into the West which helped to stimulate the Renaissance, but also the Islamic muezzins who formulated the beginnings of notated music that we use today.
But thinking of the beautiful calligraphy of Arabic, this reminds me of the equally beautiful Chinese and Japanese calligraphy and a putative commercial venture many years ago when I attempted to introduce the Japanese to a new keyboard. In a purely aesthetic way I had become interested one week-end in the graphical structure of Japanese and Chinese ideograms and I impulsively wrote to Toshiba (I seem to remember it was this firm) with an idea of the way they could be typed. I reckoned that the many thousands of Japanese, Korean and Chinese ideograms could be simply, albeit crudely, represented on a 8 x 8 grid and 'played' in chordal fashion by the left and right hands on a piano-like keyboard. I sent off my letter with the usual sealed envelope inside it containing the idea -- and then promptly forgot all about it! Some months later I received a reply to say they had considered it carefully but for various reasons declined the idea. I was actually invited to meet the writer of the letter, their Research Director, who was visiting Manchester the following month and he would explain more if I needed to hear. But I didn't bother. The prospect of travelling to dirty, grimey Manchester (as it was in those days) didn't appeal to me.
Keith Hudson
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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