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> But the information density of a language has to go somewhere. In English, I guess this is facilitated by a relatively granular sound system and complex grammar. Mandarin ended up with a relatively simple and inflexible sound system and simple grammar, so the complexity went into the characters.

What do you mean by "information density of a language"? The way you used it makes it sound like a human language must have a certain "information density" to be useful, and that in English this is achieved via complex grammar but in Mandarin it is achieved via complex characters.

That is confusing to me, because if a certain level of information density is necessary for an effective human language, then wouldn't it be necessary to have that in both the spoken form and the written form of that language?

With most languages, the written form and the spoken form are essentially the same language. Any sentence in one can be expressed in the other. People often use longer sentences and more complex sentences when writing, and use more redundancy when speaking, but that is due to the medium, not the language being expressed using that medium--with the written language the reader can control the rate of reading and can jump around in a sentence if needed to deal with complexity, so longer and more complex sentences work better written than spoken. They are still the same language. One could write just like one speaks, or speak just like one writes. Is this not the case with Mandarin?

I can tell you some thoughts I have, but please be skeptical.

If the number of combinations of sounds in your language's sound system is lower than the number of things and actions you want to talk about, words might have to get pretty long to unambiguously represent ideas. To avoid having to talk so much, we might use shorter words that would be ambiguous without context. I think this is kind of what's going on with spoken Mandarin. Too few sounds are chasing too many ideas, so there are necessarily a bunch of homophones. But it still works fine, as long as there's context, and the listener can ask for clarification.

But reading a book isn't a dialogue. The reader can't ask for clarification. Maybe this is part of the reason Mandarin tends to be written differently than it's spoken? I'm not sure, because I'm not advanced enough. Reading advanced Mandarin like in newspapers is very daunting. In text messages and IMs, my friends and I seem to write exactly how we'd talk out loud, and it works fine. But maybe this is because we're talking about simple subjects?

There are actually at least two issues here. One, Mandarin written with Chinese characters is often written differently than would be spoken aloud. Two, reading Mandarin in pinyin would be annoying.

On the first issue, I think it may be possible to write Mandarin just like you'd say it -- I think maybe it's just a tradition to make it so stilted. On the second issue, I think the problem is that there would be a bunch of annoying misparses that required back and forth clarification.

As someone who has taught themselves Chinese (lower intermediate level) as an adult, I agree with your assesement.

An equivalent premise to this author's would be to say that the inconsistent spelling and grammar of English is a millstone around its neck. The mention of the 'character amnesia' issue is similar to the same drop in spelling ability we see in Western countries amongst people who primarily write using computers.

I initially learnt simplified characters as I was travelling mostly to the mainlaind for work. Later, when I was doing more work in Taiwan, I picked up the traditional characters. It is not difficult as only some of the characters changed, and mostly it is the key radical that was simplified (like the speach radical 言) or else common characters like the default measure character 个, so once you learn these it is fairly simple to shift between the two (at least for reading).

As others have noted in these comments, pinyin is not a substitute as it is not a 1-1 mapping. That is part of the reason why spoken Chinese differs from written Chinese, being less concise and more verbose to impart additional information to assist with the decoding from sounds back to meaning.

> An equivalent premise to this author's would be to say that the inconsistent spelling and grammar of English is a millstone around its neck.

I quote from the article:

> I discussed the prima facie unsuitability of English to serve as a world communication medium.

Which is linked to another article that discusses exactly that: http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/11/23/the-unsui...

English has a similar problem with ridiculous spellings. But I don't know many people that think this isn't a problem, there is just no way to coordinate everyone to agree to change.

> But the information density of a language has to go somewhere. In English, I guess this is facilitated by a relatively granular sound system and complex grammar. Mandarin ended up with a relatively simple and inflexible sound system and simple grammar, so the complexity went into the characters.

I don't know if this tradeoff is really necessary. How much extra space would it really take to write out chinese, if it had it's own phonetic script with a few dozen characters? Maybe it would need more characters than English, but certainly not thousands.

Second, there is a big difference between a complicated spoken language, and a complicated written language. Human beings are actually quite good at learning complicated languages when we are young. We just naturally absorb them. There is no worry about languages being too complicated for it's own speakers to learn.

But writing systems are learned later in life, and therefore take more effort and can lead to illiteracy. We don't absorb writing naturally like spoken language.

>when I tell people that I really care about them and want to get along with them peacefully _in their own language_, I think it goes straight to their hearts and means a lot more to them. And it means a lot more to me, too. If that's stalling "development", I'm OK with that.

I really can't believe you said that. Development means pulling poor people out of poverty and vastly improving the quality of life for the average person. Increasing literacy is also very important for that goal.

> How much extra space would it really take to write out chinese, if it had it's own phonetic script with a few dozen characters?

I'm not a linguist, but my intuition is, that's not the problem. We could come up with a system of writing Mandarin sounds compactly using English characters, but I think there would still be too few sounds chasing too many ideas. When you see Chinese characters, meaning immediately appears in your mind. When you see the sounds of Mandarin words, I guess you start thinking about numerous possible meanings.

Totally concede that the writing system takes a lot of effort to learn. I think very few people other than the Chinese will ever learn to read it, much less write it.

On "development", it wasn't perfectly clear to me what the author meant. Honestly it never occurred to me they meant that the Chinese writing system was slowing the rise of the standard of living in China. Has any country's standard of living ever increased more quickly than China's? Of course I want all people everywhere to be lifted out of poverty ASAP. I want opportunity for everyone ASAP.

I guess pinyin is more like the German tv synchronizing English series. I live in the Netherlands, where we have subtitles on English shows and films, because that is much cheaper. So we're used to English, we all speak English. We have German tv channels here as well, and especially back in the 70s and 80s, when there were only six channels on tv, that was annoying and kind of funny. Maybe Germans growing up with these German voices makes you ignorant about the fact that what you see and what you hear does not match, but for everybody else it's absolutely clear. I see this on Spanish tv as well.

But I disagree with you "comparable ridiculous English word". The thing is that any foreigner can read it, look it up, type it on a keyboard, and pronounce it, probably remember it with a little effort and then use it at parties or to impress people. But well, I guess I'm biased from my "roman" point of view, and maybe Asian people have the same "fun" with that strange Chinese character?

Sorry, but not all foreigners are able to pronounce English words. For me, English written and English spoken are two different languages. Dyslexia is common in English world. For example, dyslexia is not possible at all in my native language (Ukrainian) because we have explicit rule about 1:1 mapping between spoken and written language, which, in turn, makes English language extremely hard to learn when adult.