Four Arts

[Lucas88]

@Lucas88, since linguistics and languages and writing are some of your greatest passions, what are your thoughts on the art of Chinese calligraphy? Don't you think in writing that Chinese characters are much more aesthetically pleasing than western written characters?

Hanzi are certainly aesthetically pleasing and make for great calligraphy but I don't think that they're necessarily more beautiful than the Latin alphabet.

The Latin alphabet looks quite clean and neat in my opinion and can actually look surprisingly exotic when it is used to write a language which has diacritics (accent marks) such as acute accents (á, é, í, ó, ú), circumflexes (â, ê, ô, etc.) or tildes (ã, õ, etc.) or special letters such as cedillas (ç) or carons (č, š, ž, etc.).

I especially think that Portuguese looks very beautiful with its diacritics. Portuguese uses acute accents to indicate irregular stress, circumflexes to indicate high vowels, tildes to indicate nasal vowels, and cedilla to soften c to an s sound before an a or an o.

Here is an example sentence in Portuguese with various types of diacritics:

Concepções de beleza visam captar o que é essencial para todas as coisas belas. As concepções clássicas definem a beleza em termos da relação entre o belo objeto como um todo e suas partes: as partes devem estar na proporção correta entre si e, assim, compor um todo harmonioso integrado. As concepções hedonistas incluem a relação com o prazer na definição de beleza, argumentando que existe uma conexão necessária entre prazer e beleza, por exemplo, que para que um objeto seja belo é necessário que ele cause prazer desinteressado. Outras concepções incluem definir objetos belos em termos de seu valor, de uma atitude amorosa para com eles ou de sua função.

The Latin alphabet is also a lot more practical and adaptable than Hanzi. You can use it to represent the phonology of just about any language with the help of modified letters. In fact, even the phonology of Chinese is sometimes represented with pinyin, a variation of the Latin alphabet with diacritics to represent the various tones.

Maybe I'm simply no longer blown away by the beauty of Hanzi like so many Westerners are because I lived in Japan for a while and can read Japanese and so for me the characters have been demystified. To me Hanzi/Kanji just look normal and don't look particularly beautiful in their everyday manifestation. I only find them impressive in their calligraphic representations, otherwise they are no more beautiful to me than, say, the Latin or Greek alphabet.

Just my views on the aesthetics of certain writing systems.

[fschmidt]

I would add that instead of demonstrating knowledge of scripture, my personal prerequisite would be a demonstration of knowledge of wisdom, tests on philosophical concepts such as morality and ethics. (So similar to what fschmidt proposes, but not necessarily from a biblical scripture perspective. Knowledge and wisdom can be obtained from other philosophical sources.)

For most of Chinese history, entrance into goverenment was based on an exam on Chinese classics particularly the Four Books and Five Classics. This is very similar to my test on scripture.

Wisdom cannot be tested because people disagree on what is wise. Only knowledge can be tested. Both the Chinese idea and the Arkian idea is to test knowledge of foundational texts. I am willing to expand the Arkian test to any foundational text of a successful culture. In the West, this is inevitably a religious text. If someone is interested in becoming Arkian and wants to add some other foundational text, just let me know.

Note that no western philosophical text is foundational for any culture. In fact most western philosophy is just crap. It all follows from Plato who reflected decaying Athens, not a rising culture.

[Lucas88]

What do you think to other ancient writing styles like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics or Sanskrit?

Egyptian hieroglyphics are primarily a logographic writing system similar to how Chinese characters are. Each logogram represents a concept rather than phonetics and so you express ideas through pictures as opposed to spelling out the sounds of a word. Each logogram's pronunciation must be separately memorized. This form of writing system is supposed to facilitate more conceptual ways of thinking and allow for more fluid connections rather than getting caught up with phonetic representations. It is also said to be more conducive to "right-brained" thinking.

Sanskrit is most commonly written with the Devanagari script which represents the syllables of the language. The script itself looks aesthetically pleasing enough.

If you had to choose one as a language spoken globally which language would you choose?

Sanskrit

Do you have any other thoughts on the other arts of the four mentioned in this thread? And do you have your own criteria to join your own envisioned aristocracy similar to the ancient Chinese scholars?

I don't really have anything to add. Ability in a musical instrument deemed classical, calligraphy, painting and a game of strategy in conjunction with knowledge of esteemed texts and a body of sapiential literature seems like good criteria for admission into an aristocratic government.