Chinese characters
Article
Chinese characters is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 21, 2024 and July 19, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Whereas Chinese characters were “balanced and well-proportioned” like “beautiful women””; “many Chinese characters used to look a lot more like the things they represented”. It most often appears alongside English, Abenomics, Alan Turing.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: June 21, 2024
- Last seen: July 19, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
-
- English (2 shared issues)
-
- Abenomics (1 shared issues)
-
- Alan Turing (1 shared issues)
-
- Amazon (1 shared issues)
-
- Amazon jungle (1 shared issues)
-
- An Encouragement of Learning (1 shared issues)
-
- An Outline of a Theory of Civilization (1 shared issues)
-
- Andrew Nevins (1 shared issues)
-
- Anglosphere (1 shared issues)
-
- Ansei (1 shared issues)
-
- Ansei Treaties (1 shared issues)
-
- artificial intelligence (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Some of these objections were aesthetic in nature. One Japanese scholar complained that Dutch letters were simply too ugly to communicate civilized ideas. Whereas Chinese characters were “balanced and well-proportioned” like “beautiful women” and “deftly constructed” like “golden palaces and jade pagodas,” the letters of the Latin alphabet were “confused and irregular,” resembling nothing so much as “dried bones” and the “slime lines left by snails.”
Inline links: complained
This reminds me of what little I know about how written languages changed over time. For example, many Chinese characters used to look a lot more like the things they represented (icon-like), but became substantially more abstract (symbol-like) over time:
Eight examples of how Chinese characters have changed over time. (source)
Inline links: source
Is there a clear boundary between indexes, icons, and symbols? It doesn’t seem like it, since things like Chinese characters changed gradually over time. But Everett doesn’t discuss this point explicitly.