Using non-ascii symbols

[Runsun Pan]

From 1387-1814, a ~430 years period, that's quite a long time.
About the total recountable history of Taiwan...

In her 400 some history Taiwan has been occupied by several
foreign powers, including Dutch, Tsing Dynasty from China, Japan,
and KMT party from China again. The long time fight against foreign
powers were all futile, resulted in a 'macro-personality' of getting used
to be slaves.

The mentality of being slaves is that when you have the chance to
play master yourself, you still look up to the old master to either get
approval or beg for mercy. This resulted in a bizzard situation in current
Taiwan that even a local-based, democratic government was elected,
the old foreign power is still the underground power that truly control
all aspects of Taiwan. They reject whatever policies the democratic
government plan. Many nation-wide constructions that the old power
planned and supported when they were in power, they turn their positions
into rejecting those them.

The slave mentality of the public is something that help those old power
to paralize the society. With that, a language reform to reduce the cultural
influence of the foreign power is therefore hopeless in Taiwan (at least
currently).

Maybe Norwegians have some sort of that mentality too ? Considering
that they rather to elect people from the old foreign power ...

This is in some ways quite the opposite compared to Nynorsk
in Norway, which was an attempt to revive the old and pure
Norwegian, after being dominated (in politics as well as in
grammar) by Denmark from 1387-1814. (I guess it was a
complicating factor that the end of the union with Denmark
led to a union with Sweden. The Norwegians probably had some
difficulties deciding what neighbour they disliked most. When
they broke out of the union with Sweden in 1905, they actually
elected a Danish prince to be their king.) Anyway, only a
fraction of the Norwegians use Nynorsk today, and the majority
still speak the Danish-based bokmål. On the other hand, the
spelling of bokmål has also been modernized a lot, with a
series of spelling reforms of both languages.

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Runsun Pan, PhD
(e-mail address removed)
Nat'l Center for Macromolecular Imaging
http://ncmi.bcm.tmc.edu/ncmi/
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[Alex Martelli]

Indeed, I don't think I've used ÷ for division since about 7th grade,
when I first started taking Algebra (over 30 years ago).

I used it in APL, and the last time was less than 20 years ago;-).


Alex