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Comment by pringk02 | Hacker News Reader

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-...

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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...

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.

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.

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