From: CurtAdams@aol.com
Date: Tue Oct 07 1997 - 13:50:42 MDT
In a message dated 10/7/97 11:45:25 AM, lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net wrote:
>> I find it an exceptional advantage to be able to call across the country
>> or across the ocean and talk to people and understand them. People today
>> having a hard time with Shakespeare and Chaucer is more an issue of
>> general illiteracy and lack of the Chinese reverence for the ancestors
>> than of phonetic drift.
>
>Yes, the technology of the phone might have been different had our
>language suffered as much phonetic diversity as the Chinese; perhaps
>the telegraph would have been more useful, the symbol set much larger,
>and would have been automated sooner.
But our language *has* suffered as much phonetic diversity as Chinese. It's
just that the dialects as close to ours as Mandarin is to Cantonese or Wu are
called Dutch, German, and Swiss-German. Voice is more satisfying and faster,
especially if you have to signal ideograms; people just restrict their
calling to those who they can speak to. That's no more onerous for a
Cantonese speaker than a Dutch one.
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