On Wed, 5 Dec 2001, Christian Molstrom wrote:
> I'm lost. Michael, were you on one of your late night crack binges again?
Ah, probably just too much wine at the Pink Cow followed by an ill-advised
late-night trip to Radio:on. Someone should take his notebook and H"-card
away and this will stop. Or at least be limited to the 500-byte missives
he can compose on his keitai.
> I think one of the important points of the original thread was not
> simply the spatial issue of efficiency, but thumb labor as well
> Simple case in point: the word Canada, which goes beautifully into
> both writing systems. In Japanese it is 3 glyphs, in roman 6.
Well, for me it was definitely thumb labour that started it all out,
because even at my stage of incredibly bad Japanese (nobody told me early
on that this dialect I was learning called "nampa" is not suitable for
use in the office--well, at least not to my boss) I find it easier to
compose messages in Japanese than in English on my keitai.
This particular example may not be quite typical, but it is instructive
to note that in Japanese, カナダ is 5 keystrokes to enter (2
for katakana conversion), whereas "Canada" is 10, assuming automatic
Palm-style capitalisation (probably more, in reality, if you care about
capitalisation).
But after further thought, I reckon that most of this efficiency is
due to the language itself. Even with abbreviations ("wher ru now?", "l8r")
it's rare that English gets as compact as Japanese ("どこ今？", "また").
The writing system helps, but without that big boost from a language that
reguarly leaves out most of what you're talking about--to the point that
even the Japanese regularly get confused about the topic of conversation--
I doubt we'd see much difference.
One more thing that would be interesting to look in to, though, would
be the space in terms of non-technical books. I suspect that the
Emacs book had a lot of katakana in it, and I have to say that most
of the technical books I've seen have been pretty similar in size and
page count between the Japanese and English versions. But katakana is
very non-space-efficent; it's much worse than romaji. Is it just my
imagination, or are Japanese translations of foreign novels always quite
noticably physically smaller than the originals?
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 3 5778 0123 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
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Received on Wed Dec 5 06:09:36 2001