Would it be so wrong

[james_davis_nicoll]

To try to convince people that Japanese SF novels tend to be shorter than Anglospheric SF novels because Japanese has fewer words than English? And a lot of Japanese consists of words borrowed from other languages.

Comments

I forget

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Which SF author posited a future in which the Chinese ruled themselves by some sort of divination involving Chinese characters, which was impossible for everybody else because nothing is as compact or as ambiguous as characters?

Re: I forget

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider:

In China, too, the sheer pressure of population had forced an advance from ad hoc improvisation along predetermined Marxist-Maoist guidelines to a deliberate search for optimal administrative techniques, employing a form of cross-impact matrix analysis for which the Chinese language was peculiarly well adapted. Well before the turn of the century a pattern had been systematized that proved immensely successful. To every commune and small village was sent a deck of cards bearing ideograms relevant to impending changes, whether social or technical. By shuffling and dealing the symbols into fresh combinations, fresh ideas could automatically be generated, and the people at a series of public meetings discussed the implications at length and appointed one of their number to summarize their views and report back to Peking. It was cheap and amazingly efficient.

But it didn't work in any Western language except Esperanto.

Re: I forget

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I knew I could rely on you (Why, one wonders, would it work in Esperanto? No conjugations and people are too dumb to infer them?)

Re: I forget

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

Because Brunner loved him some Esperanto?

Re: I forget

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

This seems like an isomeme to the bit in Snow Crash where Sumerian is human brain machine code.