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Comment by naming_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Strongly disagree.

If you can remember the word "chocolate" but not the spelling then you can guess it. You might write choklit or choclate or something but you can at least get close.

If you forget what 警察 (police officer, jing3cha2) looks like then you're just completely screwed. Maybe you can remember a radical or two but it's still just going to be wrong and not meaningfully recognisable.

I guess you could write down 景茶 (jing3cha2) and rely on the phonetics, or use a different word if you know one, but it's still wrong on a level that "choclit" just isn't.

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The counter-argument would be that the person could just use the pinyin or use a digital device to get them the characters. But as the article pointed out, those are both modern conveniences. Less than 100 years old both. The script absolutely gives no clues otherwise.

Let's put it this way: We know what ancient might egyptian (most likely) sounds like because they gave their writting system the uniliterals, which are pronunciation guides for complex words. We know that they said waw, and we know what a waw sounds like. They did this probably so they would not to explode their character count from hundreds to thousands.

> I guess you could write down 景茶 (jing3cha2) and rely on the phonetics, or use a different word if you know one, but it's still wrong on a level that "choclit" just isn't.

If a non-native did this in their own way would likely look wrong, but Chinese natives do occasionally use phonics to write or to substitute some characters with others.

Yeah I agree with this. It's also super common in Pinyin to just typo and choose the wrong character through autocomplete.

I'm strictly referring to the handwritten language here, basically I don't think there is an analogue in alphabetic languages.

I don't think these two forms of'amnesia-induced' typos are so different. "Typos" happen quite often, especially when typing on a smartphone and selecting the wrong character. And people learn to read it correctly. It's sometimes used intentionally, e.g. 歪果仁.

Exactly this, it was only recently my Italian friend was musing about how even other European languages don't really have this ability to just absoelootleigh fudge staff ind stihl b undurdudd.

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