Please correct me if I'm wrong, but were obtuse writing systems like Chinese (and by extension, Japanese) developed to keep the general population illiterate and to ensure only the rich and royalty could afford to learn to read, and through that maintain power?
You're wrong.
>>1305015
I doubt it. The character's that are in the written Chinese language developed from picture symbols. Eventually they became more complex over time until the government had a simplified version created to make it easier for everyone to learn. To the Chinese, it is not as complicated to learn as it looks to non Chinese, so I doubt they made it hard to keep out peasants.
Here is an example of how it developed over time. I know ri isn't the most complex looking of words but it shows how the words came from pictures. For ri, it started out as a drawing of the sun, and now today looks more like a box than a circle.
>>1305015
In a way ideograms are a much more natural evolution of the simple pictures used to convey stuff by primitive cultures. We're the weird ones writing with phonetic symbols
No, it's because they didn't suffer a Bronze Age collapse.
>>1305015
>the everything in history was a scheme to by The Man to keep people down meme
Natural writing systems that were developed from scratch are always logographic, so that development wasn't on purpose or surprising. It has been preserved because of the immense esteem and reverence that Chinese (and Japanese) people have for the script: Even if other simpler scrips might have been used in parallel (like the Nüshu writing used by women in Hunan), they never had the same prestige.
>>1305015
Of all writing systems, phonetic systems are somewhat anomalous.
Consider the variety of non-phonetic systems that developed independently: pictographs, the hieroglyphics of Mesoamerica and Egypt (and arguably China), the undeciphered Indus Valley script, the Incan knots (maybe not writing, but record-keeping somehow), and cuneiform.
So uh... yeah. Phonetic/syllabary systems are not the default.
>>1305187
What's even the relationship between both?
>>1305015
Yes. You can see patterns of arbitrary complication in modern languages as well. The people will be abused if they find comfort in miserable lives. Lazy, happy, people have no faith, no hope, because everything that they could possibly want is already theirs. Just go visit a slum or something and take a look at their retarded, happy, fornication centered, bullshit culture.
No, it's the opposite. They started at painting that everyone could understand, then developed into characters.
It's not that much harder to learn Chinese characters than Latin words. They're still constructed from a limited set of radicals.
>>1305250
The Bronze Age Collapse led to the adoption of phonetic written language, where symbols represent sounds rather than ideas. China never underwent such a collapse so they stuck with their old system.
>>1305254
>unnamed axises
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Explain pls.
>>1305328
Implying one thing necessarily lead to another
>>1305353
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory
This is control theory, that. Axises could be a reference to anything: time, distances, units in a store etc I guess you are not familiar will this
The Y axis is desired to be 1, which is impossible without negative feedback. To be even clearer, if you have to choose between only negative feedback and only positive feedback, you will pick the former if you are smart.
The pic is related with the post because comfort and saturation implies a culture without negative feedback. The lack of it is why we have these freaks-of-nature kinds of culture throughout history, like Aztec, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, African, European Barbarians etc
>>1305373
It led to the abaondonment of written languages in the what once were hearts of civilizations. The written languages that survived were pigeon languages, which were more phonetic.
>>1305427
phoenician language was not some sort of pidgin, and its alphabet was the core for phonetic alphabets
>>1305416
> Axises could be a reference to anything: time, distances, units in a store etc I guess you are not familiar will this
The most dumbass thing I've read and I'm not that guy you're talking to, so according to you there's no need to address what do both axis represent???
>>1305466
It is not dumb, you just didn't understand. Control theory is the same applied to any dynamical system ie: simple mechanisms, self-driving cars, ant colonies etc it is abstract like numbers are in math. For example, you can apply Pythagoras Theorem in infinite ways and units, it doesn't matter what units and specific context you are in fact using in each case because the Theorem stays the same. So asking for "named" axioms is like asking what units are abstract triangles made of, which is stupid.
>>1305466
The graph shown doesn't actually represent anything except tendencies within numbers themselves. Axis are only applied when you notice a pattern in reality which happens to mirror the pattern which these numbers take.
>>1305015
You don't need to do that when most of your population is too fucking busy farming and you kept chopping heads off when some uppity little shit tries to rebel against you.
>>1305510
Wrong, and please refrain from answering for me if you don't really care about the subject.
>>1305015
Lu Xun argues that this is indeed the case. Or at least one reason why they did not develop easier writing systems, not necessarily that it was the original reason for creating the system.
http://pinyin.info/readings/lu_xun/writing.html
"6. Consequently Literature Became a Rare Commodity"
>>1305015
Absolutely wrong.
Historically, what do you think the Chinese bureaucracy and the whole shebang was?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
Similarly Edo period Japan had very high literacy rates which helped them a lot when they decided to Westernize
Linguistically, you're also wrong.
The Chinese writing system is very simple, it just requires a lot of memorization. The fact that it relies on symbols rather than on sounds allowed the Chinese to expand their writing system to their whole language family.
However the chinese script doesn't work very well with either Korean (which developed on its own arguably one of the best writing system of all time, Hangul)or Japanese (which adapted it to fit their language, thereby including phonetic signs).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oPTcam3_BE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K53oCDZPPiw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHC3i6N9Wvk
>>1305015
It's very useful IMO. If you speak French and I speak Russian and we don't understand eachother we could both write letters in exchange. It works because they have the exact same meaning regardless of spoken language. If the entire globe had commited to this system then who knows how the present might be.
Certainly if you see these characters every day since birth it might not be a problem to learn and use.
>>1305502
These things are incomparable dumbass.
>>1305185
Modern Chinese is more phonetic than ideographic.
四 in ancient times used to mean "snout." Now it means "four." Why? Because it's pronounced as "four."
