Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2004/11/09
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]>OOPs! I forgot Morse, so I guess I am at 2.5 languages. Morse is a communication medium not a language. Otherwise, we could consider talking on the phone, chatting on ICQ,or everything else a separate language. I read that the reason the Japanese naval code was broken so easily during the Pacific War was that they used regular morse code in roman letters rather than a more complex code that combined katakana and kanji. The Japanese language only have 5 vowels and 13 consonants and repeats them in regular patterns (a vowel always after one of the consonants). So a simple cipher was easy to break. In any case, morse code is not a language. And computer languages are not natural human languages either. I speak Japanese, English, and Japanese Sign Language (which is a distinct language from spoken Japanese). Karen -- Karen Nakamura http://www.photoethnography.com/ClassicCameras/