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> Hangul can be composed from smaller blocks

Not “can be”, “is”. Hangul was designed, it’s alphabetic and morpho-syllabic features were intentional.

What is even the point of pedantic "well, duh" comments like this?

"English {can be,is} written using the Latin character set"

"The symbol 'e' {can be,is} used as a vowel"

"Italian {can be,is} spoken in Rome"

"Python {can be,is} used to program a computer"

"A car {can be,is} used to drive on the road"

Because not everyone knows Hangul and could learn something wrong.

But it's not even strictly correct from a technical point of view. In Unicode, Hangul syllables can either be encoded directly as a single codepoint, or composed from multiple codepoints each representing a single jamo.

One could conceivably devise a Morse code encoding that simply uses the Unicode codepoints of the syllables. It would be a bad way to do it, but it's an option. Composition isn't a hard requirement for Hangul encodings.

You could use pinyin or bopomofo as a base.

Written Chinese can be thought of as a syllable alphabet with 100s of ways to write each syllable. For a fluent reader it is easier to read with those contextual hints, but strictly speaking it is not necessary.

Spoken Chinese works just fine without them.

Morse code usually has its own vernacular so it is easy to get around the lack of characters.

> You could use pinyin or bopomofo as a base.

Ah yeah, that would be the obvious solution today, but neither were invented yet in the 1880s – I was kind of thinking from that viewpoint: "how could they have done better in 1880?", rather than "how could we do better today?"

The best I could think of is a UTF-8 like scheme, where a prefix selects the number of digits where less digits represent more common characters. I'm not entirely sure how well that would work in practice as I operated a telegraph exactly once in my life (as a child). I know figure/letter/Cyrillic shifts in telegraphs could cause some problems if the shift got lost or was garbled, but I suppose by prefixing every character solves this – but then again, why didn't they do this for Baudot code/ITA?

I hadn’t considered late 18-hundreds as a context, but I’m gonna stick to my guns and say wade-Giles.

Wades incarnation goes back to the 1860s.

Since you don’t need the alphabet as an intermediate you can can encode each initial and final from the table[1] as an individual character to balance the number of encodings per symbol with the number of symbols per word.

Since Morse typically encodes simple messages with its own vernacular I think you can safely drop encoding the tones.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade–Giles_table

I wonder how one could design a better Morse code for Chinese

In terms of efficiency, I guess you might start by ranking characters by frequency, and build a Huffman code? Then think about adding parity bits or sync symbols or whatnot.

It's hard to imagine people learning it, rather than painstakingly looking up each character in a book, but I suppose it'd be similar to learning any other numeric mapping. Wikipedia says "Chinese expert telegraphers used to remember several thousands of codes of the most frequent use".

Please forgive my extremely ignorant question, but could Chinese be written phonetically, maybe using the IPA or some existing/custom script?

If so, that should require much less memorization than memorizing thousands of Chinese characters, and a "morse code" could be made from the phonetic script.

Absolutely no since everything about Chinese is not based on pronunciation. Even the meaning of a word change by the pitch. If you don't specify the pitch in the phonetic transcript, the level of uniqueness in pronunciation of vocabulary is so much lower than other languages.

Same may say Japanese can express their language solely in pronunciation (Kana) but this is not true. There are easily 20+ meanings for the same pronunciation and are even hard to distinguish them with context provided. Just open any Japanese dictionary then you will see that it is a completely broken language if without the expressive power of Kanji (or Chinese characters).

For a simple example in practice, many Japanese names can be written multiple ways based on the kanji used, ending up with different meanings and different implications, while being pronounced exactly the same.

For example, the common name Michiko can be written in many different ways with many different meanings, such as:

    美智子 — "beautiful wise child"
    美千子 — "child of a thousand beauties"
    見知子 — "child of recognition"
    道子 — "child of the way"
    路子 — "child of the road"
    倫子 — "child of morals"
    皆子 — "child of all"
    通子 — "child of passage"

You should look at something like "sousou" or "koukou", the range of meaning spread from noun to verb to adjective to everything.

This is not that unusual for languages. For example,

> range

Can mean a wide open area, a set of things, a stovetop, a measure, to measure, to vary between extremes, to line up, or to pick an opposite side.

No, "range" do not share the same prounciation with other word.

https://www.homophone.com/search?type=begin&q=range

I think what you misinterpreted is that you think "sousou" and "koukou" is a word in Japanese, no, they are sound, the prounciation.

I think they were just making the more general point that most language are very context-sensitive.

“Dear” and “deer” if you want an explicit English homophone.

Please consider the amount. How many collision can happen in one prounciation in English? It is on average 2, maximum about 4. Chinese is like 6-10, Japanese is like 10-20.

If you don't do comparison, of course there is no difference.

Are you saying Japanese speech isn't fully comprehensible without seeing the written characters?

If not, what are you saying?

I mean, I'll believe you that there are more homonyms in Japanese, sure, but it must still operate as a spoken language somehow.

Just give more examples.

Look a doctor, consult a doctor, supervise a doctor, all sound the same, have same phonic transcript, in Japanese, only differ in the Kanji/Chinese character. Either you extend the sentence and write more words, or show that you are sick and have runny nose, otherwise it is hard to convey idea clear without Kanji/Chinese characters.

Often you will see people talk in Japanese will say "erh!?" then stop and both of them are confused. Half of the reason is that people are just guessing what their component trying to convey but as the conversation goes longer and having more context info, they found that they are not talking about the same thing.

With lesser context info e.g. situation, places, visual clues, emotion, intonation, harder you can comprehend.

What is a "word"? Whether a sequence of sounds/symbols is one word with two unrelated meanings or two different words that are coincidentally represented the same way is quintessentially a semantic argument.

You could add tones as numbers; a la "yi1 wan3 shui3 jiao4, duo1 shao3 qian2?". But that's really clunky to read. It's not that much to add tones as accents; that would work OK for spoken language, since you already have to make sure it's unambiguous. But it wouldn't work as well for texts primarily designed to be written, as there remain a lot of homophones.

And this create a practical/political problem that people speak a different dialect cannot recognize what this encoding is trying to express. Even though literally they share the same writing system.

How do they recognize that their own language when they speak it?

Think of Chinese as one script but multiple languages. The spoken languages have about as much diversity as European languages, but they all share a mapping to characters which are meaning based, not pronunciation based.

So you can use Mandarin pinyin, (though there are a lot of homophones) to serialize to a pronunciation, it wouldn't be understandable by a Cantonese speaker.

Hmm... so would written chinese be one language, and all the spoken language different languages? They just developed a script based lingua franca.

"Language" vs "Dialect" is a matter of degree. If you have a tiny bit of exposure to, say, German or Icelandic, you can actually catch a fair amount of what's said in those languages given the context. The same is true for Mandarin and Cantonese. A lot of the words really are just different pronunciations of the same word; 我 (me) is wo3 in Mandarin, and ngo5 in Cantonese; 你 (you) is ni3 in Mandarin and nei2 in Cantonese. A lot of the grammar concepts are the same; you don't conjugate verbs, you instead have "markers" that indicate things like "completed action" or "experienced action"; measure words, and so on.

But a lot of the grammar and words are just different -- at least in the spoken language; and typically subtitles are all in Mandarin.

So my son watches Peppa Pig in Cantonese; I can read most of the subtitles in Mandarin. Peppa will say, "Da4 di, nei2 tai2 ha2!" (Look, Daddy!); but the subtitles will say 爸爸，你看一下！ (ba1 ba! ni3 kan4 yi2 xia4!) Note that only one of those four words is the same (你/ni3/nei2). "da di" (Cantonese) has been replaced with "baba" (Mandarin); "tai2" is replaced with "kan4" (a different character); and "ha2" has been replaced with "yi2 xia4" (an extra word).

"It's all Chinese" is a sort of fiction; and from my outsider's perspective, a fiction which heavily favors Beijing and the Han majority at the expense of the various minority groups. Written Mandarin is pretty close to spoken Mandarin; "official" written Cantonese is very different than spoken Cantonese -- to the extent that the verb "to be" is a completely separate word.

The case GP is talking about is (say) having subtitles in Chinese characters (in Mandarin), which can be read by people who speak Hokkien or Cantonese; or having street signs in Hong Kong written in "Written Cantonese", which can be read by people from Beijing.

The answer to the question, "How does someone from Beijing understand someone speaking Cantonese?" is generally, "They don't."

If someone from Beijing doesn't understand someone speaking Cantonese, having a phonetic/phonemic writing system per dialect will not be any worse.

I think GP‘s point is that right now they can read the same text even if they can’t understand it spoken. Moving to a phonetic script would mean they can no longer read the same text, ergo worse

A phonetic/phonemic script would be worse for mutual intelligibility for those privileged enough to know written Chinese, which is notoriously difficult to learn.

But it might be better for literacy in general because it would be much easier to learn. And, though it is a comparably much more trivial issue, better for creating something like a morse code.

That said, I know there are many other issues apart from simple ease of learning that figure in to what language people learn or want to use. Written Chinese has a rich history and culture, and it's tied to people's identity so of course jettisoning it for something arguably more practical with the added downside of loss of mutual intelligibility among those who know written Chinese would likely result in strong opposition.

If you see the counter-arguments are coming from historical and cultural stuff, then you are making wrong assumption here. At least not in this branch. Literally you are the first one to mention this argument.

I mean, yeah. You give up one thing and gain another. For instance, it would be much easier for people speaking those other "dialects" to learn to speak and understand putonghua, if they were seeing a phoenetic form of putonghua all around, rather than seeing characters which they read in their own words.

Alternately, we could all replace our spoken languages with Chinese characters. Then we could all read Chinese subtitles, and reach each others' languages to some extent.

But I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone not already using Chinese characters for their own language who would consider the benefits worth the cost. It seems to me (as an outsider who's been studying the language for a few years) a sort of linguistic "Stockholm syndrome".

> everything about Chinese is not based on pronunciation

Then how can Chinese speakers understand each other when they speak?

Usually from contexts. If datastream could be interpreted as "correct horse battery staple" or "add salt to taste" and the situational context is a cooking instruction, the latter interpretation has to be correct.

Historically, people from different regions would be able to read each other's writing (send letters to each other) even if their spoken dialects/languages were mutually incomprehensible. You get this in European history, too, just not to the same degree.

It would be a pretty rough deal for people relying on text-to-speech if that were the case.

> Absolutely no since everything about Chinese is not based on pronunciation.

This conflates so much. Hanzi (mostly) isn't pronunciation-based[1], but Hanzi is simply one, and a secondary one at that, representation of the language. The primary representation of the language is the spoken representation, and unless Mandarin speakers spend their time in silence, it's very much pronunciation based.

[1] But it make plenty use of rebuses, where you have a character made up of two characters mashed together into a single character, one part indicating the kind of thing (such as a tree), and another giving a word it sounds like.

> Even the meaning of a word change by the pitch.

No, these are distinct words that have different tone contours. We wouldn't call "bat" and "pat" the same word in English, even though the only difference is that they different voicing, nor would we call "stoop" and "stop" the same word when they differ only in vowel length. The same goes for languages with contrasts in aspiration, ingressive vs egressive consonants, and so on. Tone is no different.

> Just open any Japanese dictionary then you will see that it is a completely broken language if without the expressive power of Kanji (or Chinese characters).

Japanese speakers must have awful trouble speaking with one another in that case.

> No, these are distinct words that have different tone contours. "bat" and "pat" ... "stoop" and "stop" the same word

I don't want to repeat but your examples are not the situation in Chinese speaking system. When you write out the sound of different words, they are literally the same e.g. "stop". The distinction is whether you pronounce it in C major or E or G. Same goes for many southeast asia languages although not an expert on those.

> Japanese speakers must have awful trouble speaking with one another in that case.

In fact large chunk of jokes (either modern of traditional) from Japan is due to different vocabularies share the same prounciation.

Even not a small proportion of detective stories' twist comes from different interpretation of the same prounciation. Like someone say something on the phone but misunderstood by the others, or someone writen down a message before dead in Kana (prounciation) instead of Kanji (meaning). The whole story is just playing with those linguistic hash collisions.

Yeah, I don't speak chinese, but there are many european languages that use accents to change sounds of vowels. In portuguese, the difference between grandmother (avó) and grandfather (avô) is just in how you pronounce the o. I am extremely skeptical that any language that humans speak could be impossible to create a phonetical writing system for. It may need features that the latin alphabet lacks, but it should be possible.

no, this is not correct. you don't need perfect pitch to speak proper chinese, it's about the relative pitch contours. C vs E vs G has nothing to do with it. and native chinese speakers are not conceptualizing it as "pronunciation" + "pitch" as two separate things that exist alongside each other. the pitch is a fundamental part of the pronunciation, not external to it

i dont know japanese but it sounds like your example is just saying that japanese humor has a lot of puns

Vietnamese is a tone language, and it is written in a Latin script (with a number of accent marks). If it can be done with Vietnamese, it can be done with Chinese. For that matter, lots of tone languages are written in Latin scripts.

The problem with Chinese is not that it is a tone language (not absolute pitch, but relative pitch); the problem is that there are many regional dialects with different tone systems, and other pronunciation differences as well. Not that that's a real problem; English has lots of dialects with very different pronunciation systems, and it's written in a dialect-agnostic way.

Just to start with, there are a significant number of characters that share the same pronunciation.

Enlglish also has plenty of homonyms and English speakers can still understand each other when they speak.

I’m just as ignorant if not more so! :)

could Chinese be written phonetically?

A bit of Wikipedia research suggests possibly yes, this is basically what pinyin is.

Although others in this thread are saying you would potentially lose meaning that way. Surely that would only be the case for written text that’s ambiguous when spoken aloud? Which I can’t think of a situation where that would be a serious problem except for intentional puns.

Korean language dropped Kanji altogether postwar, and one of funny anecdote circulated on the bad parts of Internet in 2000s was that a cause of a minor train fire in South Korea was that a requirement of fireproof wood was misinterpreted as incendiary wood, because the language relied on Kanji for distinction between those. CJK languages could be used in phonetics only, sort of as in backup mode, but not really.

If only they'd used english and required inflammable wood!

Many Latin-derived languages have that one problematic word. It's not only English.

The opposite of it would be "non-inflammable", so it's not really ambiguous. It's just anti-systemic and confusing. "Flammable" isn't supposed to be a word, even though people keep using it.

> "Flammable" isn't supposed to be a word, even though people keep using it.

On the contrary! "Flammable" has been used in English for centuries (https://www.etymonline.com/word/flammable) and at this point it's used intentionally to make it clear that we really do mean something can burn.

And "inflammable" has been around for so long that it has spread to a big handful of languages. One of those being English.

Flammable is the obvious construction you get from the Latin, but it's not exactly the word that spread into English. It seems to have been created there later.

I think the ambiguity in inflammable lies in in- prefix rather than in the second part. If someone told me that incombustible and inflammable used to point at the same property at one point, I’d believe that.

> but not really

Languages will evolve to disambiguate those situations. Vietnamese and Korean already have done so. They have no practical issues communicating with their writing systems.

It's not impossible for Chinese to do the same. Native speakers who learned Chinese through Chinese characters will always find it the most natural, and would surely consider it a pity to lose characters, but if an entire generation is hypothetically brought up reading pinyin only, they will find it the most natural and find ways to disambiguate words on their own. Not saying I support such a shift happening in Chinese, just saying that it's not impossible for the human brain and society to cope with, if it were to happen, and it's not something we (the aging generation) have much say in.

Sure it can. In fact, it regularly is if you're entering stuff in on a phone. One of the major ways people enter text on phones is by typing stuff in using pinyin and selecting the appropriate character.

I actually ran into this myself when I was testing my C program for UTF-8 support. Ended up just installing noto CJK but I wondered why there wasn’t a universal font I could use. Now I’m wondering why I can’t just fuse a font that has cjk chats to a font that has Latin ones.

You totally can, tools such as fontforge even make this pretty straightforward.

There's a Unicode quirk/mistake called Han Unification that similar CJK letters, not always close enough, are assigned same code points. As the result, each of CJK languages(Chinese, Hong Kong/Taiwan Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese ...) has to be displayed in its own fonts.

It must have been much less of issue when UTF-8 specs were formalized in early 90s, as memory was expensive, and electronic communications between CJK cultures were minimal; computers just had to have the correct font for a single specific language, and others didn't even need to render, let alone correctly. Being able to display similar letters outside of a specific language must have been a bonus.

Today it's a much pronounced annoyance as software is globally distributed, but until the Unicode Consortium figures out how to normalize this CJK situation, the font switching hack has to go on and there just can't be a single font that could render everything.

Missing glyphs would be a much smaller problem if people stop creating/using text renderers that don’t support font fallback and system font store. There are still a good number of GUI frameworks that assume one font or even one Latin font is enough. Fyne (golang) is an example; the advice, if you want to display CJK text, is to bundle a single font with all the glyphs you need…

Pretty sure Unifont will do what the author wants. Coding or system wide and you never gotten tofu. (+ the crispness of bitmap fonts)