Hacker News Reader

Comment by akavi | Hacker News Reader

Tones can be written, and all human spoken communication involves conversational cues, Chinese is not special in this respect.

View on HN

If this was so easy, pinyin (a standardized writing) would have replaced characters decades ago!

But it is that easy. Pinyin has a standard notation for the tones of words. Your position on this matter cannot seriously be "if it were possible to write Chinese phonetically, the Chinese alphabet would no longer exist".

Their position is "since it is possible to write Chinese phonetically and yet characters didn't go away, there might be more to the story" (than self-proclaimed language experts on HN think)

This is incorrect and shows a basic lack of reading comprehension. Neither I nor anyone else claimed to be a language expert. The post in question said:

> If this [writing tones] was so easy, pinyin (a standardized writing) would have replaced characters decades ago!

Which is saying that the reason Pinyin has not replaced traditional characters because it cannot accurately transcribe Chinese speech.

As the previous comment says, you're the one with reading comprehension problems. The topic of discussion is the replacement of Chinese characters with a phonetic writing. I said that pinyin already exists and it has not replaced characters, so this cannot be easy as you imagine (just writing down the phonetics of the language).

Which is your perspective, and distinct from the argument just made: that if it was possible to write Chinese tones, the traditional characters would have been replaced. It's obvious that the characters are not replaced due to cultural factors, rather than the inability to come up with a system that can transcribe Chinese speach.

I'd say nationalism is really the answer there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com