std.stream.Stream.writeable [Way off topic]

[Jarrett Billingsley]

"Bruce Adams" <tortoise_74 at yeah.who.co.uk> wrote in message 
news:fhipm8$8os$1 at digitalmars.com...

> That's linguistic drift for you. And as you point out neither Chinese nor 
> Japanese are 100% ideogrammic anymore if they ever were.

<nitpick>Japanese never was solely ideographic.  Japanese as a language was 
not written for many years; Chinese was the language of science, religion, 
and education, and to be literate in ancient Japanese culture was to be able 
to speak, read, and write classical Chinese.  Over time, Japanese started to 
be written down, but using Chinese characters for their phonetic value in a 
system called man'yogana.  These phonetic-value characters eventually 
evolved into what today are hiragana and katakana, the syllabic scripts of 
Japanese.  Some older works were written entirely phonetically, in hiragana. 
The modern mixed ideographic/syllabic writing system evolved out of the old 
man'yogana system.  But Japanese, being highly inflectional and 
agglutinative, would never have lent itself well to being written in an 
entirely ideographic way, and it virtually never was.  The structure of 
Japanese inflection, however, does lend itself fairly well to the modern 
pattern of [Chinese Character Root]-[phonetic character affixes].</nitpick>

> Modern examples like bliss show how hard it is to express certain concepts 
> that way.
> http://www.blissymbolics.org/workshop.shtml#structure
>
> As I understand it dyslexia affects people at the level of letters not 
> words. There are at least two problems. Tranposing symbols and failing to 
> distinct symbols that are similar, typically by reflection or rotation. I 
> was just speculating as to whether the ideogrammic components of the 
> language contribute to making these kinds of error less likely.
> Other possibilities are that the education system is better or there is a 
> genetic basis that is less common in the east. Studies should easily be 
> able to prove or refute these kinds of link if there genuinely is a 
> difference in occurance.
>
> Following up with some research it seems I'm not entirely bonkers. 
> Apparently there is a difference in frequency the language does make a 
> difference. Except it could be to do with being a tonal languages or not 
> rather than just the ideograms or both.
>
> http://www.straightdope.com/columns/050408.html
>
> Some more heavy going research only for those into cognitive
> psychology & psycholinguistics.
> Naturally when you think about it there are going to be multiple points in 
> the the cognitive pathway where things can go wrong and therefore multiple 
> types of reading problem.
>
> http://tinyurl.com/yp9h4y

Interesting stuff :D