Lunch with Steve

[rfmcdonald]

I had lunch with Steve DeGrace today at the Formosa tea House. It was the first time I'd seen him since before New Year's. The food was quite good--we each ordered a stuffed bun with bamboo rice and green tea. (Their green tea is excellent, incidentally.)

I quite enjoyed the hour with Steve. We talked about any number of things, including his time in St. John's (with photos!), my visit to Kingston, the problems inherent in Newfoundland separatism (being passed around between Canada and Britain, possessing an irresponsible mercantile elite in St. John's, the Catholic/Protestant divide, the irresponsibility of the current crop of politicians), China's current and future prospects (Moon landings on the one hand, a hundred million urban unemployed on the other), and the problems inherent in the use of Chinese ideograms.

Steve--and, I think, myself--agree that contrary to the thoughts of Leibniz and Voltaire, Chinese ideograms are clunky and awkward, and are already being discarded on the peripheries of the Sinic sphere--Korea has its hangul, Japan's use of kanji has given way to vernacular hiragana and katakana, and Vietnam (which needed to use two Chinese characters to represent one word, the first to indicate the meaning and the second to indicate the pronunciation) converted to Latin under French rule. The main problems I see lie in the cost of conversion--in the short term the need to teach literacy skills in an entirely new script and to create an accompanying literature would be huge, while in the long term Chinese communities would risk getting cut off from their past literature in the same way that many modern Turks have been separated from their Ottoman Arabic-script literature. It likely won't happen, but it's an idea.

It was quite fun; I should do this kind of thing more often with friends, if not necessarily at the Formosa Tea House. Any takers?