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Message: <blockquote data-quote="vermeulean" data-source="post: 12590" data-attributes="member: 112">can sort of understand your point, which sounds largely Sapor-Whorfic to me. as an example, kanji for instance being ideographic, thus having a graph-sound association secondary to the representation of ideas. but that's different from what you're talking about since Japanese is agglutinative and largely synthetic because of its inflectional properties, which isn't true of Chinese. the process of heuristic modification of mathematical ideas is something encoded in much the same way that modifiers encode meaning into logographic systems, which is more analyticalso wdym East Asians are "better" at math and logic? do you think that was historically always the case? do you judge adequacy by averages or from historical exemplars?</blockquote>