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Comment by beryilma | Hacker News Reader

Turkish used to be written using Arabic characters before the Turkish Republic. Now, the Latin alphabet is used. So, it was fairly easy (probably not) to switch alphabets for the same underlying language.

And 29 characters are sufficient to represent the sounds of the language with a couple of controversial accents like '^'.

The sounds in Chinese are probably very different and nuanced, but for Turkish, I am always surprised that sounds were very similar to European languages so switching alphabets was possible.

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The issue is the opposite. Chinese has a comparitively small phonetic pallette (depending on how you view tones). Chinese written completely phoenetically can easily become incomprehensible.

https://ninchanese.com/blog/2022/05/09/the-lion-eating-poet-...

The functional load of tones (that is, the importance of a pronunciation difference for distinguishing words) in Chinese is comparable to that of vowels[1]

"Depending on how you view tones" dismisses the important phonemic value of tones. Writing Chinese completely phonetically includes writing the tones.

[1]https://faculty.washington.edu/levow/papers/fltonemandarin.p...

I find hard to believe every language in the planet can be successfully expressed using some sort of alphabetic system, except for Japanese/Chinese (and local variants)

They could be written alphabetically, of course. The question is just what you lose, given that the characters are a massive part of Chinese and Japanese culture.

Chinese has evolved alongside its writing system for about 3000 years, and switching over to pinyin (the standard Latin transliteration) would be a complete revolution in Chinese culture.

I was responding to the assertion that writing Chinese using an alphabet would render the text incomprehensible, not arguing that China or Japan should switch over.

Curious to know how you think it's possible that Chinese people are able to speak with each other if you think writing their language phonetically would render it incomprehensible.

Then you might be even more surprised to hear the Latin alphabet is the official way to write Chinese phonetically (in mainland China), and is used to write on computers and phones. It's called pinyin.

Lots of languages are written with the Latin script despite being completely unrelated to European languages. Vietnamese for example, or Navajo.

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