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Comment by intopieces | Hacker News Reader

I recommend familiarizing yourself with the languages that these Chinese characters encode to better answer that question. Homophony is extremely common in Mandarin; eliminating characters would make reading very very difficult.

Chinese is not the only language that uses these characters. Japanese and Korean do too. For these groups, the learning curve is much less; that something does not come easy to English speakers is not evidence of its inherent deficiency.

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It's true that homophones are much more common in Mandarin than say, English. It's not, IMHO, a very compelling argument against moving the common language to a more phonetic system like Korean did with Hangul. Something like 施氏食獅史 is already incomprehensible to a native speaker (who isn't familiar with the text) when read aloud.

But spoken Chinese is quite different from written Chinese, which allows for more economy. Often a single character will be used in writing where a two-character word would be used in speech. And people's names usually can't be determined by the pronunciation; they are defined by the actual characters. If Chinese moved to a strictly phonetic writing system, a lot of culture would have to adapt: conventions around signage, poetry, proverbs, names (this is a big one!) of people and organizations, formal writing, wordplay, etc.

So what you're saying is Chinese speakers generally use two languages/registers: one for spoken language and another for written. Which is another way of saying the writing system is not actually a good match for the spoken language in the first place and mostly exists for ceremonial reasons.

I would suggest someone figure out a sane way to capture spoken Chinese in a modern (i.e. easy to digitise) writing system but I doubt it would gain any traction because of the cultural implications of the script. Most Westerners see their writing system as a simple fact of life, the Chinese seem to see it as a sacred traditional craft in the same vein as forging steel.

> Homophony is extremely common in Mandarin; eliminating characters would make reading very very difficult.

Well, it would be as difficult as understanding a spoken phrase that uses such homophones. (NLP people would probably hate that though :) )

Yes, it is difficult to understand a spoken phrase. That's why speakers rely on shared context: physical place, relationship between speaker and listener, previous interaction/s between speaker and listener.... none of which is present in a book or newspaper article that's being plucked out of the context-ether.

> Japanese and Korean do too.

Japanese yes. Korean historically but not really these days. If you try browsing Korean Wikipedia or Korean top newspaper sites, it's Hangul and some Latin characters and no Hanja in sight.

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