Another Short History of Linguistics (16)

Again, I have to emphasis the important of pronunciation. If we link a symbol with a sound, it could enrol in our language; without a sound a symbol could not be a symbol of everyday language, For instance, the following symbols appeared everywhere, but they could not be regard as language:

Pic from: http://speckycdn.sdm.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/pictogram7.jpg

Japanese have invented some symbols for athlete in the year 1964 for Tokyo Olympic Game:

Pic from: http://1stmuse.com/pictograms/

If we give each of them a sound or pronunciation then they can enrol in our language and help us to improve our not-fast-enough language. Today, we don’t like the ancient people worry about how to write down any symbol. By the help of computer, we can have exactly printing symbols if only accepted by any one. And we know, there are around 1,200 species of sound in Mandarin language kept unused. If we can use them, the languages of the world would be much better. For as we can see there are many pictogram that was invented in ancient time with their handful knowledge, and the meaning of these symbols changed many time and today. Some of them are hard to link with the original image. Why not we invent some new pictogram for our language with our advanced knowledge?

I have said that China has 100,000 characters in store waiting for waking up. But there are some meaning that the ancient people may never think about, so we may create some new characters by ourselves. Only if the computer allow us to do it, then we can improve our language perhaps.

Today, our input system still could not allow us to invent symbols easily. For instance if I want a symbol as:

It means ‘selfie’ that would be not an easy job.