Some years ago Dr. Ron Glossop and I exchanged two or three letters on the subject of the alphabet and technology. More specifically, it was Dr. Glossop's thesis that, to take advantage of modern computer technology, the Chinese would have to abandon their traditional writing system and adopt the Latin alphabet a la pinyin. My argument was that technology was made for man, not man for technology, and that the Chinese would solve any problems that Western computers might cause them in their own way, not by adopting someone else's customs.
Time, I think, has shown me right. In October the Chinese became the third nation to put a man into orbit -- and they did it with computers that operated in Chinese glyphs, not Latin letters. But I had a bit of an advantage on my side; a decade before my discussion with Dr. Glossop, I'd already seen early PC clones (the "Great Wall" desk computer) operating in a store in Beijing, in Chinese. Even in the United States, there were, as early as around 1980, hardware cards for the Apple II series to allow that computer to operate in Chinese.
Nonetheless, Dr. Glossop's arguments had validity, and perhaps deserve revisiting. Basically, at the time I calculated that an experienced Chinese typist could input data through a properly-designed Chinese keyboard at least as fast as an experienced English typist. On the other hand, an English speaker who had never seen a keyboard would be almost as much at sea as a Chinese speaker who had never seen a keyboard. The real advantage that an alphabet-based writing system has at the keyboard over a glyph-based writing system comes somewhere in between those two extremes. A language written with only fifty-two signs (1) is, for the relatively untrained novice, far more susceptible to keyboarding ("hunt-and-peck") than a language written with several thousand signs. A newbie typist in English will be far more capable and versatile at his keyboard than the newbie typist in Chinese. (2)
I raise the question because, at some point in the not-too-distant past, it struck me that the difference in terms of immediate usability between an alphabetic and an ideogrammatic language was in some ways analogous to that between Esperanto and traditional "ethnic" languages.
Zamenhof's concept of "dismemberment", when taken to its logical conclusion, meant that each "word" in the language is comprised of a series of morphemes, each of which has a specific and invariable meaning; and the meaning of the word in question is the sum of the meanings of its morphemes. This is very analogous to the alphabetic concept that the sound of a word is the sum of the sounds of the letters of which it consists.
In other languages -- let us take English as an example -- if this concept ever existed, it has been badly mauled by time and history. There are specific morphemes in English, presumably with specific meanings, but their use depends not just on their meaning but on history and context.
Let's take an example -- the Esperanto ending -E which is used to form adverbs. (3) There's a corresponding English ending: -LY. The difference is that the Esperanto -E can be added to all roots to form adverbs. The English -LY can primarily be added to roots of Latin origin (any budding etymologists out there?). Rarely is it added to Germanic roots (The boy waddled fatly through the door ?), and for some it is simply impossible, because of the relict adjective ending -LY from words which in German end in -LICH (e.g. friendly, likely, the semi-archaic goodly). In fact, for words like friendly I can't think of an adverb; you have to create a prepositional phrase (in a friendly way). (4)
At a somewhat higher level, consider the adjectives deep and profound. In Esperanto these are both rendered by the adjective profunda. Does this make English somehow richer than Esperanto? Maybe. But it also makes it seriously less learnable. If you learn English, you have to learn that deep and profound are interchangeable with respect to abstract ideas (a deep concept is pretty much the same as a profound concept), but not when it comes to physical reality (you can say a deep well but never a profound well). In Esperanto, you can say both profunda ideo and profunda puto, without having to worry about the context.
What this means is that, once you know the (relatively few) rules of Esperanto, every item you learn in the language multiplies your competence in speaking or writing. In English and other traditional languages, every item you learn simply adds to your competence.
A hundred years of experience has shown that the virtuoso speaker of Esperanto can do much the same things with the language that the virtuoso speaker of English can do. In this, Esperanto is in no way superior to the traditional languages. Similarly, the pre-beginner of Esperanto is at as much of a loss to make his way in the language as the pre-beginner in English. The main advantage of Esperanto lies in between those two extremes, as it does for the alphabetic typist.
(2) English, with its numerous spelling problems, is perhaps not the best language to compare with Chinese in terms of the advantages of alphabetization. However, traditionally a person who is old enough to approach a keyboard will also have already mastered most of the problems of English spelling. How true this may be in the current era, when some children learn to keyboard a computer before they learn to talk, is not clear to me.
(3) There are half a dozen or so particles, mostly having to do with time, which can be used without the ending -E: ĵus, jam, morgaŭ and the like. The purist can, however, always attach a redundant -E if he wishes, without rendering himself less than fully comprehensible; listeners will rarely fault him for this, and some may even admire his courage ...
(4) In Esperanto, by contrast, it's not uncommon to compress relatively simple prepositional phrases into one-word adverbs ... ending, of course, in -E.
Posted by Don Harlow at January 17, 2004 04:06 PM | TrackBack