I thought I’d posted about “The Map and the Rope”, which can be downloaded here (the abstract is dry as dust, the early pages of the book proper are stylish and informative):
https://jyx.jyu.fi/handle/123456789/36734
The idea as far as I can remember is one I found illuminating — besides adoring the title. When assimilating a highly inflected language such as Finnish, all that morphological complexity needs to become effortless. Two aspects of the learning process — though in the end, both may be Wittgenstinian “ladders to throw away” — are the rote mastery of paradigms, and an understanding of their underlying phonemic logic. The latter is the map, the former the rope. Knowing why it is like that helps, but recollecting a paradigm involves fewer cognitive steps. In the end, even that dissolves into a “just knowing”. I will give just one example of a hard one:
manner [mainland] –> in the illative case = mantereeseen
The two tricky but entirely regular things are that the sequence <nt> assimilates the dental stop to a nasal in a closed syllable, but not an open one; and the stem of oblique cases ends in a long e (instead of possible short e, or i) giving gen. ‘mantereen’ which looks a bit like an illative … so we then need an ‘s’ to attach it. As Maisa Martin finds in her study, few native speakers of Finnish would be able to explain that, and it may not be much help to the non-native learner in the throes of trying to describe a fjord. But children of two or three can do so effortlessly. They can also walk on the sea in winter, but that is another matter.
This leads me to the actual topic of this post, the difference between how hard it is to learn something versus how easy it is to deploy once mastered. A simple example is found in the Dvořak keyboard layout. The numbers on a standard QWERTY keyboard are placed in numerical order; Dvorak has 7,5,3,1,0,2,4,6,8, which while it clearly makes some concession to being “intuitive” – the higher odd and even numbers being in sequence – places the more common smaller numbers under the stronger index finger. On the other hand, the vowels on the home row are A O E U I, which is enough to offend anyone who has ever taught children how to read, though it may make more sense to Scrabble players.
But once you have learned it, which probably takes no longer than learning QWERTY, it falls trippingly off the fingers, at least just the same, and purportedly with considerable ergonomic advantage. There is, as it were, no map, just rope.
Chinese characters are generally considered to be an extremely complex writing system, that no one in their right mind would have consented to: it is difficult to the point of perversity, and an uncharitable observer would naturally conclude it was just a scheme to retain literacy as the preserve of the few. But although Communist China introduced some aesthetically displeasing simplifications to a few hundred of the most common sinograms (“hollow characters”), there is no appetite among the Chinese to reduce their language to the phonetic transcription that is Pinyin. A Chinese teacher I once had described her distaste at having to do so in another class she taught with students who wanted to sidestep the characters: you can’t see what the words mean, she said. I imagine she, though a native speaker, found herself needing to read out the words in her mind to hear what they meant; whereas ma – horse is a pictogram of a horse, and ma – mother is the same pictogram a bit smaller, with a pictogram of a woman to its left. Harder to learn, harder even to write, but easier to read, and even knowing the language poorly, its writing system feels to me supremely literate and supremely rational.
At the other extreme, I have also dabbled in Gregg shorthand; I am not familiar with any other such system, but I dare say the same points apply for Pitman and the rest. The aim is to simplify writing by reducing redundancy both of phonemes recorded, and the actual cursive shapes. For example, both ‘form’ and ‘from’ are represented by f-m, a curve and a horizontal line, two strokes easily executed. This ‘short form’ can appear as a component in such words as ‘deform’ or ‘information’. The complexity is vast. The upshot is, hard to learn, easy to write, hard to read. Even reading back your own shorthand is like the Chinese teacher frowning at her pinyin on the whiteboard.
Simplicity is a virtue, but what is actually simple is no simple question.
Views from Apipucos 