The connection between culture and computer

Since ancient times, Chinese characters have taken root and blossomed in China, and their influence has spread far and wide overseas. Now the ancient Chinese characters have finally entered the computer age. The generation, study, application, dissemination and research of Chinese characters are cultural phenomena; The use of computers is also a cultural phenomenon in a broad sense (its internal attribute is computer science). Then, when Chinese character culture and computer culture cooperate and collide, what role do they have with each other? What kind of spark does generate have?

The recognition of Chinese characters by computers has been strengthened, and the ability of individuals to write Chinese characters has been weakened. For example, when people are operating a computer, they can get a batch of multi-tone words for selection by popping up the initial letters of several initials through a certain intelligent input method; At this time, the operator may not be able to write well, so long as he can recognize it, he can input Chinese characters (that is, recognition input). Such as children, people with low educational level and foreigners learning Chinese characters, this may happen. In fact, in the field of "teaching Chinese as a foreign language", some people at home and abroad advocate that learning Chinese characters can solve problems by relying on computers as long as they can recognize them (some people object). Generally, those who use computers to input Chinese characters will also have the situation of "writing less and recognizing more"; For these people, although there is no problem of weakening their writing ability subjectively, there is still a tendency to strengthen their identification ability objectively. The function of computer scanning images (including words) is a great progress, but the pressure on people's handwriting ability is also aggressive.

There have always been differences and contradictions between the recognition function and the writing function in Chinese characters. In fact, people's ability to recognize Chinese characters is stronger than their writing ability, which has never been the case. Conversely, the recognition function of Chinese characters is greater than the writing function (experts have already pointed out this fact). For example, the recognition function of Chinese characters exceeds that of pinyin, and its writing is greatly difficult to pinyin. Chinese character placards are easier to identify than those written in pinyin with the same size. In short, the identification and writing of Chinese characters are closely related and can be properly decomposed. We see that some semi-literate people can read general books only by their ability to recognize (but not write) Chinese characters. Some cities have recently allowed primary school students to learn "recognition" before learning "writing" (but never relax "writing"), which takes advantage of this special nature of Chinese characters.

Of course, due to the complexity of writing Chinese characters, we have to make more efforts to learn Chinese characters than to learn pinyin characters. Therefore, when observing the cultural phenomenon of Chinese characters, we should see that although it is easy to "recognize", it takes a great deal of energy, time and wealth of the whole nation to acquire this "recognition" for all people (instead of just letting children "recognize" some characters) (in a word, with the development of science, it is difficult to "input" the writing and handwriting ability of Chinese characters into the human brain). In a word, it is necessary to observe this kind of problems comprehensively, and we have to admit the fact that there is a contradiction between the recognition and writing functions of Chinese characters. This fact has just triggered a series of thought-provoking phenomena and problems.

computers are conducive to the promotion of putonghua marked with Chinese characters. The words in Putonghua can be marked by Chinese characters, and the written language of Putonghua is the world of Chinese characters. Computers make the relationship between Chinese characters and Putonghua closer, which is beneficial to the popularization of Putonghua and the elimination of illiteracy. The reason for this phenomenon is that when making TV programs through computers, subtitles are often provided: not only Chinese characters are matched with the sounds of Putonghua, but also dialects are matched with Chinese characters pronounced according to Putonghua; Not only with general content, but also with subtitles for uncommon words (reflecting ancient things or difficult content).

The computer "saved" Chinese characters, which also affected their progress. After all, Chinese characters are not pinyin characters, and they need to advance and develop. It cannot be said that Chinese characters have developed to the extreme. Computers have influenced the development of Chinese characters to some extent; But on the whole, the computer brother still "saved" the Chinese character big brother. It is difficult to learn Chinese characters, especially in printing and other links, which are not suitable for contemporary technology and speed. But computers make Chinese characters less difficult and adapt to contemporary things, such as computer laser phototypesetting, which makes Chinese character printing easy. This is not "saving" the Chinese character big brother!

to a certain extent, computers slow down the development of Chinese characters in the direction of pinyin, but they are also more stable. Although the pinyin of characters is a universal direction, Chinese characters have their own special ways. Chinese characters have a history of 5, to 6, years, and they have made a long-term step in the stage of poor combination of ideographic meaning and phonographic sound, and have become a rare "immortal bird" in non-pinyin characters in human history. There are complicated reasons for this: First, there are too many homophones in Chinese (including disyllabic words), which depend on Chinese characters to distinguish them. Chinese characters are basically parallel to morphemes and have the function of word formation, which Chinese also depends on. Second, the horizontal penetration effect of Chinese characters on dialect differences and the vertical penetration effect of Chinese characters on Chinese long-standing culture make us inseparable from Chinese characters. These reasons, coupled with the massive intervention of computer culture, have greatly eased the problem of writing Chinese characters, and made the reason why Chinese characters are an immortal bird particularly powerful. This naturally slows down the development of Chinese characters, and tries to take a steady and natural way forward without violating the development direction of Chinese characters.

Computers will eventually promote the development of Chinese characters (form and function). As the product of new information technology, computer can accommodate and utilize the usefulness of Chinese characters as a traditional and ancient carrier. The computer has further "stripped" its recognition function from the overall function of Chinese characters, which indicates that if the shape of Chinese characters further evolves, its "recognition characteristics" will be strengthened. Of course, the evolution of Chinese characters has its internal mechanism, and computers only play a certain role.

Chinese character culture also stimulates and promotes the development of computer culture. Computers undoubtedly benefit from the study of Chinese characters in word processing, laser typesetting of some oriental characters, software development and so on. Chinese character culture also promotes the popularization of computer culture in China. Because of the huge number of Chinese characters, it is necessary to solve the problem of inputting into the computer through special codes. For example, unlike inputting pinyin characters, we have to use more than one byte to represent a Chinese character, and we have studied a more clever way to solve it. These developments have contributed immeasurably to computer technology. In addition, it is precisely because of the complexity of Chinese characters that scientists make great efforts to study and use computers to solve problems such as various means of word processing, which is greatly conducive to the promotion and popularization of computer culture. In the long run, the development of Chinese character culture will stimulate the penetration of computer culture into society and people's hearts, and make considerable progress in the research and development of software and hardware. (Beijing Language and Culture University)