Re:Why was western printing superior to Asian printing?
by WalterBright on Sunday September 04, 2022 @12:16PM
(#32714578)
> their meanings are relatively self-evident
All I can say is LOL to that. Even the original Mac icons required someone to tell you what they meant first, down to today where half the icons on a car's controls make no sense, and of course there are the laundry icons, which people can probably guess correctly half of them.
> letters where you have to learn how to pronounce an otherwise mostly arbitrary squiggle.
Yes, we learn the sounds they make in first grade. Then we can sound out new words, and look up the meanings of words in the dictionary. Not so with icons. There's no sounding them out. There's no way to look them up in a dictionary. If you can't guess what they mean, you're out of luck.
> arbitrary squiggle
The letters are all derived from icons. The letter A is a bull's head and horns turned upside down. Phonetic alphabets are derived from icon languages, and are a great invention.
> Unicode isn't inventing anything, it's codifying things that already exist.
Not true. As for emoji, there is no difference between them and icons.
All I can say is LOL to that. Even the original Mac icons required someone to tell you what they meant first, down to today where half the icons on a car's controls make no sense, and of course there are the laundry icons, which people can probably guess correctly half of them.
> letters where you have to learn how to pronounce an otherwise mostly arbitrary squiggle.
Yes, we learn the sounds they make in first grade. Then we can sound out new words, and look up the meanings of words in the dictionary. Not so with icons. There's no sounding them out. There's no way to look them up in a dictionary. If you can't guess what they mean, you're out of luck.
> arbitrary squiggle
The letters are all derived from icons. The letter A is a bull's head and horns turned upside down. Phonetic alphabets are derived from icon languages, and are a great invention.
> Unicode isn't inventing anything, it's codifying things that already exist.
Not true. As for emoji, there is no difference between them and icons.