tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Aug 16 13:01:37 1999
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Re: Vowels
- From: Terrence Donnelly <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Vowels
- Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 14:54:35 -0500
At 12:53 AM 8/13/99 EDT, T'Lod wrote:
>In a message dated 8/12/99 12:23:02 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
>[email protected] writes:
>
><<
> If what you are describing is a syllabary, that is a LOT of
> characters. >>
>
>Considering that Chinese children must know 30,000 symbols to read a
>newspaper, HISlaH, law'.
This is an old wives' tale. IIRC, the Chinese government has
designated 1,800 or so characters as "basic", and these are the ones
taught in school. Japanese also has about the same number of officially
basic kanji. It seems to me that the people who use these characters
every day probably have a good idea of the upper limit of human memory
for them.
On the other hand, you'd have to be a _really_ dedicated Klingonist to
learn 1800 Klingon symbols which you'd use seldom, if ever, in
real life.
-- ter'eS