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Entry tags:
memo
to: Al Trautwig
from: Fox (and thinking people everywhere, come to that)
re: orthography
Dear Al:
I'm going to give you a break because I'm sure you didn't write your own copy. But listen: We have only twenty-six characters in English with which to make ourselves understood. The Chinese communicate with more than fifty thousand, though only a few thousand are in everyday use. This is technically true, except that our characters are called letters, and the Chinese ones are called words*, and we have tens of thousands of those as well.
Get back to us when you've counted how many kinds of brushstroke there are. I bet you it's not more than a few dozen.
signed,
no, I don't read Chinese, but come on
*characters and radicals, I know, it's not just one character = one word, but the voice-over was still wrong. i'm just sayin.
from: Fox (and thinking people everywhere, come to that)
re: orthography
Dear Al:
I'm going to give you a break because I'm sure you didn't write your own copy. But listen: We have only twenty-six characters in English with which to make ourselves understood. The Chinese communicate with more than fifty thousand, though only a few thousand are in everyday use. This is technically true, except that our characters are called letters, and the Chinese ones are called words*, and we have tens of thousands of those as well.
Get back to us when you've counted how many kinds of brushstroke there are. I bet you it's not more than a few dozen.
signed,
no, I don't read Chinese, but come on
*characters and radicals, I know, it's not just one character = one word, but the voice-over was still wrong. i'm just sayin.
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