Languages and the Computing Profession

highly abstracted. The Chinese writing system uses logographs--conventional representations of words or morphemes. Characters of the most common kind have two parts, one suggesting the general area of meaning, the other pronunciation. Second, most Chinese characters are words in themselves, so the space between two characters is a space between words. True, many words in modern Chinese need two and sometimes more characters, but these are compounds, much like English words such as password, output, and software. Third, Chinese does have grammatical signifiers. Pointing a browser equipped to show Chinese characters at a URL such as www.ausdaily.net.au will immediately show a wealth of what are plainly punctuation marks. Fourth, Chinese is an isolating language with invariant words. This should make it very easy to analyze statistically. English is full of prefixes and suffixes--the word prefixes itself has one of each--which leads to more difficult statistics. I do not mean these observ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2004
• Where: COMPUTER
• Authors: W. Neville Holmes
• Keywords: Chinese Characters, COMPUTER 2004, English Words, Modern Chinese Need