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Comment by kwanbix | Hacker News Reader

Honest question, why haven't china moved to a western (?) alphabet based writing? With my ignorant knowledge, it seems crazy that you are using that way of writing today. Using 24 letter combinations vs memorizing 3000 (min) to 20.000 icons!

When I was a kid, my best friend was chinese, and we could never do anything on saturdays because he had to go to a school to learn chines, and how to write in chinese was very hard and time-consuming.

Do you know? Care to explain?

EDIT: I am not from the US, but from Argentina.

EDIT2: I am talking about the effort to learn how to draw (not only read but draw!) very complex looking 3000 icons vs. the effort of learning 24/26 and some rules. With a western language, by just knowing a few pronunciation rules, you can read any word. At least in Spanish. I am not implying that Chinese are bad, or that the language should die or anything like that.

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I honestly believe you asked this question out of your ignorance.

Despite the apparent difficulty maybe the people of China like their language nevertheless.

Languages vary widely in their expressivity.

Also, I think language (and the script) is closely related to the culture as well. The people of China might not want to let go of that.

And what about the literature and everything that's already written down in their native language? It's not just a question of translating everything. Trust me, things get lost in translation.

Also, if we're going to have everybody in the world work with the same script, there are arguably better candidates such as Arabic and Sanskrit.

In Sanskrit, for example, there's only about 50 letters (49?), it's impossible to mispronounce, the whole gender-neutralization situation becomes irrelevant (because well, things like car, village, fruit, pencil etc have genders (of which there are 3 btw — masculine, feminine, and neuter, but they aren't used in the way you would think)).

> why haven't china moved to a western (?) alphabet based writing?

By the way, here's how this appears to us non-westerners — okay here comes this Western hero who thinks the rest of the world is nonsense and should be replaced by the superior Western™ system.

> Do you know? Care to explain?

I'm not a historian. But in the history, actually there was an attempt to "romanize Chinese".[1] And it failed. It's a complex issue, mostly a political one, and to say there is one single reason that it failed would be a gross simplification.

My anecdote is:

1. Chinese is a very "easy-to-read, hard-to-write" writting system. It's compact and information dense compared to alphabet based system.

2. There are too many homophones. In a daily conversation, you provide extra context with body language and your tone. But in a written context you have no such tools. All you have is "icons".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Chinese

Chinese writing is not phonetic, while a western alphabet would necessarily be phonetic.

One may think that is a disadvantage for Chinese, but since there such a wide variety of spoken Chinese languages, Chinese writing acts as a unifying framework across different spoken languages.

This allows a (more or less, ignoring traditional and simplified) common script for one billion people.

So a person in Taiwan can reasonably read a newspaper in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing. But that same person would probably have trouble speaking Cantonese with Hong Kongers.

> Chinese writing is not phonetic

There is a similar thing going on with written arabic, where Ḥarakāt diacritics indicate short vowels, long consonants, and some other vocalizations, but these are generally left out of writing except in the Qur'an. So you have a classic phonetic key with which to recite the Qur'an, but almost all written text besides that can be read by wildly different speakers.

I'm amazed at how two (Mainland) Chinese people can always communicate.

The level of shared cultural foundation is beyond what we have in Europe, I believe.

The Chinese language is an absolute joy to learn.

While they use the same script, they are not interchangable. A person from Taiwan would recognize characters in a HK or Japanese newspaper but would not necessarily understands it. A good half would only make sense to someone who speaks Cantonese.

Also, several languages have moved from a script if iconographic characters to phonetic ones: for example Vietnamese and Korean, the former adopting a phonetic western alphabet with accents, and the latter developing a new phonetic script, hangul. Japanese developed two new syllables based scripts, hiragana and katakana, which are mixed with the old word characters (kanji). All these used to use Chinese styles characters prior to the switch.

No reason Chinese couldn't do the same. In fact, it did… pinyin is a formal phonetic alphabet for Mandarin Chinese that's based on the western alphabet with additional marks denoting the tones of the words. It's only hard I'm an educational setting, but you could use it anywhere!

Someone from Taiwan can read a HK newspaper no problem.

The pinyin phonetic alphabet only works for mandarin, while a unified written script applies beyond mandarin.

Learning written Chinese not only connects you across varying spoken Chinese languages, but also connects you with the rich history of Classical Chinese text.

The formal pinyin system is great, and should be used along side with the actual Chinese characters. But there is no reason to replace the rich written Chinese characters, which connects across space and time, with a narrow and hollow substitute.

A similar reason why US hasn't switched from imperial units, just way bigger.

The current system works, replacing it would be a massive multi-decade long change with a lot of opposition. Cultural pride/arrogance plays a big role. It's not inconceivable to think that the Chinese regime might fall in the process if it tried to pull it off. Given all these, the benefits just don't outweigh the costs/risks, at least in the horizon of the next 100 years.

Yeah, I imagine it won't be easy. What needs to be assessed is if the gains are worth it.

If you want to write Chinese text on a computer - you still have to use Latin alphabet, because it's not possible to put thousands of characters on a keyboard.

So a different writing system for Chinese has already been developed.

Some other languages also have more than one writing system. (Serbian and Azeri).

When mobile phones became accessible to the general public then many people used Latin alphabet to write in Russian, because SMS didn't support Cyrillic properly.

Vietnamese also didn't use Latin originally.

Eh, you can find at least three (Traditional) Chinese input methods on any given modern system, and Pinyin is only one of them. Cangjie and Bopomofo require no understanding to Latin alphabets. Not to mention there are other less used methods such as Boshiamy.

And speech to text!

Speech to text is very impractical and error-prone.

Talking to a Chinese-speaking coworker, my understanding had been that speech to text was very popular in China, especially on phones?

Yes it is.

Tangent: Anthropic's CEO worked on Mandarin speech recognition at Baidu: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.02595

OK, but it doesn't work in situations where you don't want others to hear what you type. And in places with lots of noise.

In English I use speech to text a lot (including completely substituting it for typing for a year when I had wrist issues). If your microphone is right next to your mouth and you're using good software it works in surprisingly noisy environments: I can talk quietly directly into my mic on the subway without issues. And when I'm at my desk I use a boom mic next to my mouth, with similar benefits.

Quiet environments were, for me, more of an issue: it combines very poorly with open plan offices since you bother the people around you.

As I understand - Pinyin is still the most popular one. It also is compatible with all standard Latin keyboards and doesn't require touchscreens or microphones. So pretty much all educated Chinese people are familiar with the Latin alphabet. But for most people outside China - the Chinese alphabet looks like gibberish.

Pinyin is used in regions where Simplified Chinese is the predominant written language, but other systems are generally used in regions where traditional Chinese is the written language e.g Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan

In Taiwan, they don't use Latin script to type, but a phonetic script based on character radicals called bopomofo

The fact that you can write Chinese in Pinyin does not mean that Pinyin would be a good writing system between humans.

>If you want to write Chinese text on a computer - you still have to use Latin alphabet,

Non-native Chinese-Script language learner - I use touchpad stroke-input on my macbook 50% of the time (and touchscreen stroke input on phone 100% of the time).

This is an interesting question. computers deal in numbers. but were originated in a latin alphabet and are optimized around an alphabet style of processing. while we managed to jam chinese into unicode by treating it as if it were just a big alphabet. this is not entirly correct and there is a lot of information lost in the process[1]. what would a native chinese computer system have looked like?

However note perhaps the simplicity of the latin alphabet(a small set of separated characters) lent itself well to a simple implementation on early computers. which got them out of numerical processing earlier than if they had to speak chinese or even something like arabic where the written language has advanced to the point where the connected cursive form was the only correct form. the rendering of which would be tricky for early computers. note that english has a connected cursive form, the art of which has just about been destroyed by computers.

1. I don't read(or speak) chinese. but the characters are composed of sub characters and stroke order that may provide hints or insight into the nature of the character. Or they may not, I don't know, I don't read chinese.

You don’t have to use pinyin to type Chinese on a computer. You can use the zhuyin input method.

Not the original commenter, but I live in Singapore where I am surrounded by Chinese characters and several Chinese dialects. The first issue is that there isn't one "Chinese" language. Mandarin is dominant as the official language in China, but even here in SG one can still hear Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, and a few other dialects. While these each have unique grammars, the characters for the most part can still be understood across dialects (and for languages like Hokkien, have been mapped to those characters). Also, for Mandarin, there are very few distinct sounds (phonemes), even accounting for tones, so there are many, many more homonyms than in, say, English. The characters help disambuguate, whereas spoken or phonetically-written Mandarin relies heavily on context.

Not sure why you're being dumped on here. Written Chinese is objectively harder to learn than any other written language still in use today for exactly the reason that people need to memorize thousands of characters.

There is perhaps a benefit to having several mutually unintelligible languages all "sort of" compile back to the same written text, but that benefit is increasingly being eroded as the version of Mandarin spoken in mainland China becomes the lingua franca, not just inside China but also in parts of the diaspora.

If everyone is more-or-less able to understand spoken Mandarin, then it's no big leap to codify a phonetic written representation of that pronunciation, whether using Zhuyin or Pinyin or something else. It's a totally achievable goal, and we know it's achievable because Vietnam, Korea and Japan already did it. Claiming it's impossible is just Chinese exceptionalism.

The real question is not whether it's possible, or whether it would make the language easier to learn, it's whether Chinese-speaking people - and in particular the government with an authoritarian rule over the education of the overwhelming majority of Chinese-speaking people - want to do it. And the answer is they do not. And so it persists.

Also - should the thing we optimise for in a language be how easy it is to learn? You learn a language in a small fraction of the duration you will actually use it for.

English is a terribly inconsistent language, btw. If you know others, you realize there's a big gap between pronunciation and the word based on historical reasons. People who learn struggle a lot to communicate effectively due to these inconsistencies. Maybe some of them can't go play with their friends too.

If we used something else instead of english as the Lingua Franca, some say lobjan, maybe we could be more effective. Let's all switch.

I hope the point is clear. It's not all about the most efficient from your perspective but cultural, historical, pragmatic reasons, including that languages and ways of communicating mutate by themselves instead of being pushed top down.

Information density: Writing takes awhile, but reading them is super efficient, a short line of words can replace a small paragraph in alphabet based writing. For us Chinese reader, could never "appreciate" the character limits then-twitter, our language is so dense that 12 Chinese character(which occupy 24 single spaced characters) can describe a full event, what can alphabet based writing do with 24?

The same reason no one talks Esperanto in their day to day. Just because it's easier doesn't make it the right thing to do.

Why is the US still using the imperial system?

I'm not sure if you're aware, but asking why an ethnos/nation hasn't significantly changed their language/culture to appease someone who finds it difficult to grasp comes across as incredibly rude.

I am not asking for me. I never interact with Chinese writing, so it is not my problem, I am asking for them, as I imagine that learning a minimum of 3000 icons would take a lot of time. Computers struggle with Chinese writing (or at least last time I talked with my friend he had this keyboards where they had hundreds of combinations).

I found that believing that a person trying to understand something and asking a respectful question is rude is incredibly rude and ignorant.

Chinese people could very easily ask "why has the western world not switched to the Chinese alphabet?"

Neither is objectively superior to the other, you are just used to what you were born into

But you can make the same argument for any non-englisb language today - any language is more difficult to use than English when it comes to computers. For the general case, if your friend was living in China, it'd be the norm, there wouldn't be any Saturday classes. The diaspora has to make do. Moreover, in China, it is the norm, they do not perceive their writing as being problematically difficult, they've made do with it for some years now and it works in China.

I do want to stress that any language that is old enough will eventually contort into a state where the writing is lagging behind the spoken language as it develops faster, and eventually lots of room for optimization starts to appear, lots of legacy to remove. As the culture develops and the spoken language simplifies and words get added, ambiguity seeps in, rudimentary language construcs start to appear unfamiliar to the commmon speaker. The vocabulary now consists of a large mix of old and new, with some redundancy and barbarisms thrown in for good measure. And now, there's lots of room for improvement. And sometimes a nation (or its authorities) decides that its time to simplify things, as mainland China and Sweden and others have done. I wish someone did this with English, bit since there's a multiplicity of English speaking countries, there will never be a meaningful overhaul that doesn't turn into a massive mess.

I have absolutely no trouble using spanish or german on my computer. Only 2 more keys.

I'm pretty sure that your friend couldn't do anything with you on Sat was a parenting issue, not a language issue...

If he juse had used Spanish, he would have been learning piano or something on Saturday.

The icons are made up of strokes and there are only a handful of strokes in Chinese writing. The combination of strokes and the location is arguably as complicated as spelling in English.

When I read anything, be it mandarin or Japanese or English, I attach meanings to words first. In fact, I am attaching meaning to logical structures and phrases, and then the individual words make the detail. Converting words into sounds seems to be a different skill from converting words into meaning. It really doesn’t matter whether the words are made of strokes or letters of the alphabet, the breakdown of the little details is a separate mechanism from comprehension.

It's not. The imperial system was introduced after the secession, differs on a few key reference values, and has a ~20% larger pint.

How many words did you memorize in English? All it's inconsistencies like butcher were the pronunciation isn't recognizable from the spelling.

Is it read or read?

I doubt you can simply map the pronunciation of the chinese spoken languages to the latin alphabet.

And that's only the words, you also need grammar and different languages have tenses that don't even exist in other languages. Just compare Hebrew to English.

After that you need to train a billion people, you still need to conserve the knowledge of language or all the historical written texts are lost.

BTW were I come from it's at least 26 letters.

But memorizing words is relatively easy. Adding to that the drawing is not. I am not saying it is impossible, it is not obviously. My mother language is Spanish, so I also have 26 letters.

>林 (lín): This character means “forest” or “woods” and is composed of two 木 (mù) characters side by side. It represents a small forest or a group of trees. 森 (sēn): This character also means “forest” but represents a larger, denser forest than 林 (lín). It is composed of three 木 (mù) characters arranged in a triangle.

That's more logic between the symbols of tree, wood and forrest than between the same english words, and it even looks like some kind of tree.

Spanish has lots of those accent marks, so it's more than 26 letters, it's also accent marks.

Spanish has accents in the a, e, i, o, u. I never use them, ans is still understandable. If you really believe that writing chinese is easer than writing in Spanish, you are absolutely wrong.

Speaking as another native spanish speaker, I also basically never use accents. I sometimes add them by applying spellchecker suggestions in formal writing (Work emails, etc) when I see the red squiggles.

Easy to say if you already are used to one language.

Maybe better to compare it to languages that also use letters to represent words but aren't from the same family.

Maybe Arabic.

I work with a friend who is Chinese and she often takes notes while learning things. She is at least as fast as I am at longhand writing in English AND she has to translate to Chinese on the fly. Also she ends up with WAY more compact notes than would be possible in an alphabet.

I think maybe it's English that would benefit from being written in ideograms! The popularity of emoji is partly due to their compactness.

Yep, Chinese characters are terrifyingly complicated, but the Chinese language is more compact sentence-wise and text-wise. Actually, the Chinese were acutely aware of how inconvenient the heavily-stroked characters are. That's why they invented simplified Chinese.

Let's instead have the english speaking community switch to a devanagari alphabet based writing system.

It is so much more comprehensive - you never have to fumble about with the right way to pronounce something. Any particular combination of letters has one definitive way to pronounce it - so if you can read a phrase you can also speak it out without any ambiguity.

So much better than the mess english is. </sarcasm>

For what it's worth, one of modern China's most famous writers, Lu Xun, was adamantly in favor of eliminating the characters. Your question is by no means stupid.

There are many reasons the characters have not been replaced by an alphabet. Ultimately, it comes down to the weight of tradition. Chinese has had basically the same writing system for 2000+ years. The characters are deeply embedded in Chinese culture, and the structure of the language itself is closely bound up with the characters. Only young kids use the alphabet, as a stepping stone to learning the characters, so proposing to use the alphabet comes across as if you want to dumb down the language. There are over a billion people who have learned how to read/write the characters, so the system has huge inertia and buy-in. As others have noted, this is like switching from imperial to metric, but a million times harder and emotionally fraught.

Because people like being able to read texts that already exist, so switching to a different writing system is usually a downgrade.

(Also, learning to write English probably consumed more of your time than just a Saturday per week.)

Hot take: we also just memorize icons, they just happen to me made out of 26 symbols. But to read fast, you absolutely do use some high level icon based parsing, IMO

Definitely, but you can read a word you never came across (in a language were the Latin alphabet mapping is actually sane, like Italian or Spanish) by just knowing a few pronunciation rules, that depends on the language. Clearly English is not a good example for this, I know.

The same is true in Mandarin Chinese, to some extent. A native speaker or someone who speaks the language very well can deduce a lot about a word's possible meaning and pronunciation from its component radicals. There are less of them per character than the average English word has letters, but a similar system exists where a Chinese person who comes across a new word in a paragraph will have a lot of context clues to tell them what that word might mean and how it might be pronounced.

That I didn't know and it's actually fascinating! Can you point me to some resource that explains this with some examples, for people who cannot read Mandarin Chinese? TIA!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...

Thanks! (should have thought abou Wikipedia)

Well, I still think Latin alphabet (or the Arabic one, but I don't know it enough to be sure about it) is more optimized / easier to grasp conceptually when you don't know the word. For example one of the compounds illustrated mixes 2 pictographs, but one is used for the meaning and the other for the sound of the final word (the "to wash oneself" example); that doesn't sound easy to me.

There are enough radicals that it's reasonably common you can indicate both the likely correct pronunciation and a bit of the meaning with one of them, and radicals can also be compounded/nested (e.g. combine two radicals to make a character, then that character is used as a radical in another character). It's why the standardised vocabulary test, HSK, is so important, because very often more technical or less common characters are built from more common characters that you do know. Sort of like English, where I could tell you that I majored in "lemonadology", and even though that's not a word you've ever seen you would probably have a decent idea how to pronounce it, and that it's probably got something to do with studying lemons, likely in the form of lemonade. This is informed by a cultural context where we both know and understand what "lemonade" is and means, as well as just the knowledge of the "ade" and "ology" suffixes, and the "lemon" noun. The same thing happens with Chinese characters, sort of. Those characters contain a lot of information, they are very much not just tens of thousands of letters. Also, new characters are invented occasionally by people combining previous characters and radicals, although that's less common than in English. And "word" in Chinese can encompass both many individual characters that can be considered words on their own, but also combinations of characters that form a distinct word. Like 老公 means husband, so it's a word, but if you interpreted it as two words you could read it as "old man"；no Chinese speaker would do so seriously, it's not ambiguous in its "husband" meaning, but it comes into play when wondering why 老公 is different from 丈夫，which is a different way to say husband with a different cultural context.

For reference, Chinese people think their language is very easy and that English is absurdly hard (for example, that we have an absolutely unnecessary yet mandatory number of ways to indicate tenses and plurality, and if you screw them up we think you're stupid even though there's no legitimate functional use for the differences - to say nothing of the fact that even with simple pluralisation like adding an "s", that's not one sound, that's three distinct sounds that a Chinese person would need to learn). A nationalistic Chinese on Weibo might air the opinion that the Chinese script is more optimised/easier to grasp conceptually when you aren't familiar with the concept than English, where you have to have familiarity with the suffixes and prefixes of two separate non-English languages (one of them dead!) as table stakes, plus a lot of familiarity with French. Of course, this wouldn't be correct, most people don't really understand a new word they come across in that much detail (in English or Chinese), it's just because you're not a speaker of the language and it's in a different script that it seems so hard to you. I promise you, Chinese is not objectively harder than English to learn. Chinese children have the same language development timeline as English and Arabic speakers, and Chinese scientists are very prolific and accomplished. Chinese is just quite difficult to learn for an English speaker.

First of all, I'm pretty sure that my PoV is biased by the fact that I'm European and grew up in a Latin alphabet world. With that said, I'm not saying that Chinese writing hinders Chinese people capability or development - China had been and it's becoming again the leading country in the world on many aspects - but just as programming languages syntax go, the same applies to human languages. Python syntax is simpler and less verbose then old-school Java for example, but that doesn't mean that shitty software can be written in Python and great software can be written in Java, or that someone cannot learn Java as their first programming language. Maybe there are some mental tricks and shortcuts that kick in with pictographs that I'm not aware of because I'm not a language expert or a Chinese speaker, and that make everything simpler for the brain that what I can imagine from my point of view. Thanks for the interchange anyway, I learned something new :)

One thing to note though is that this is easier with traditional Chinese characters than with simplified characters because part of the simplification was often removing components of a character or simplifying them so that they no longer have an obvious meaning.

The simplification did make it easier to write by hand (which is becoming less and less relevant with computers) but doesn't necessarily make it easier to learn new characters because of this.

Exactly. I am a native Spanish speaker, I can attest. :D

> Honest question, why haven't china moved to a western (?) alphabet based writing?

I wanted to link an article written by a linguist, but I couldn't find it. One of the hurdles would be tones: in order to express them, one would have to use plenty of diacritics and westerners would not be able to pronounce them correctly anyway.

Because it's part of the cultural heritage. Very much like the weird spelling of many English words is.

In particular, the phonetics of Mandarin Chinese underwent several waves of simplification to the point that many characters are pronounced pretty much the same - in particular, there are a lot of syllables pronounced /yi/ or /shi/.

So, transition to a purely alphabetic writing system would mean losing access to all the sophisticated texts of culture. There is even a poem illustrating that phenomenon, and taking it to the extreme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...

More practically, everyone learns their first language as a child, and at that point does not get to decide whether something is too "crazy" to learn or not, since nobody asks their opinion.

Further simplification was attempted at some point by the Communists (also as a means to increase adult literacy) but they rolled it back quickly.

Also, it's not 20,000 "icons" to learn. There are a couple of hundred composing elements ("radicals," although it's not entirely correct to call all of them this), which just repeat themselves in different arrangements, and there are some rules to it. Beyond these, only a hundred or so characters have purely unique elements.

Taking this to its logical conclusion, we should all be speaking Esperanto.

My guess is that there's a combination of network effects (i.e., 1.4 billion people already use it), cultural identity, and inertia.

I personally believe the Chinese writing system to be superior because of the information density which leads to in my opinion better web UIs.

Becauses strokes convey meaning beyond sounds.

Because our alphabet doesn’t work for tonal languages and inventing a new one requires a king

Vietnamese is a tonal language that uses the Latin script. But yes, it's awkward.

There are chinese languages - completely tonal - whose only comprehensive written representation is with the roman alphabet.

Alphabet-based writing is inferior. Convince me otherwise.

This is by far the most ignorant and racist comment I have seen on this website.

Why would you think so?

I mentioned that I didn't know and that was ignorant on the matter, and I wanted to know what people thought what the reasons are.

I have a multi-racial family, friends from across the globe (including china), and I am far from racist.

I think your comment is the most ridiculous and rude comment I have seen on this site

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