[nsonnad]

Hello, I'm the author of this piece. It's a very good question, and the answer may simply be that script systems are inferior, but anecdotally I would say there are two advantages:

First, it makes the etymology of the script is very apparent. Often etymology in for example English is very obscure, and requires great leaps of imagination and inference to make the connections. Compare that to the character 灣 referred to in the piece, which means "bay" and contains the "water radical." The etymology can be made more clear in this way.

Second, the script is agnostic to how the characters are pronounced. This is what has allowed it to be used for several languages in China (often inaccurately referred to as "dialects")—which are often pronounced completely differently—for hundreds of years.

That said, there are clearly many, many disadvantages, and the main thing preventing change may simply be inertia.

[taejo]

The "etymology" you speak of (and is often used in a Chinese context) has nothing to do with actual etymology. The origin of characters is barely related at all to the origins of words.

The word 灣 wān (= bay, cove) might be related to 彎 wān (= curve, bend) but the character doesn't tell us that; it's certainly not related to 水 shuǐ (= water) which appears in 灣 as 氵.

灣 wān also provides an excellent example of where the "character etymology" definitely isn't the actual origin of the word. 臺灣 Táiwān (= Taiwan) is made of characters meaning "terrace" and "cove", so you might think aha, Taiwan has a purely Chinese etymology from "Terrace Cove", but in fact it's unrelated: it's from Siraya (an indigenous Taiwanese language) Tay-uan (= sea people).

[azernik]

It can also, as my Japanese textbook pointed out, be faster to read if you're familiar with the characters in a body of text. Like the difference between reading "one hundred forty-three" vs "143". It's the input that kills you.

But I think computer/smartphone semi-phonetic input kind of gets you the best of both worlds.

[Nitramp]

Experienced readers of alphabetic languages recognise words by pattern matching their shape. That is, you do not individually decipher the characters that make up a word, but you pattern match on (mostly) the ascenders and descenders, and then maybe sanity check first and last characters.

That greatly speeds up reading, but also makes it hard to discover typos, in particular characters inside of words that have no as-/descenders.

In this way, alphabetic writing is maybe more accessible - novice readers can decipher character by character and map to phonemes, thus having a way to understand all words; experts pattern match and read faster.

[azernik]

And the tradeoff is that it's not quite as well optimized for the pattern-matching fast path. The systems just have very different performance/usability characteristics.

[gozur88]

I'm skeptical of the "quick to read" argument. An educated Chinese speaker generally knows something in the neighborhood of 5,000 characters ("full literacy" is supposed to be 3k-4k), which is far less than readers of phonetic systems (20k-35k). Unless you're a professional writer of some variety you're going to spend more time looking up words in Chinese.

[gizmo686]

I am not familiar with Chinese, but in Japanese, the characters do not necessarily map 1 to 1 with words, so you have some words that are composed of multiple characters. For example, "adult" would be written as 大人, which are the characters "big" and "person".

[jessriedel]

Sure, but the script speed-reading advantage only comes at the level of having single symbols for single meaning. Once you need to combine symbols to get the (additional) meanings, you're not any faster than phonetics.

[jiyinyiyong]

Yeah, just like the words "handwriting", "television", "sunshine", "seafood", the meaning of the whole character can be inferred from the parts.

[mazerackham]

Characters aren't necessary words. In Chinese, a lot of phrases are expressed in groupings of 2 characters and 4 characters.

Especially in these 4 character groupings, you can find a lot of efficiency and elegance. It expresses ideas & meaning that would take 20-100 words to fully express.

[mfringel]

Many Chinese words are two characters in length.

[ww520]

The permutation of those 3k,4k,5k characters when combined into 2-character word or 3-character word are huge.

[Xophmeister]

> and the main thing preventing change may simply be inertia.

And pride. I've noticed the Chinese are quick to defend their writing system, despite its lack of "efficiency". Which is understandable: it is a thing of great beauty, with thousands of years of cultural heritage.

[swang]

Which "Chinese"? Your point seems to miss where the pride lays.

There is a lot infighting since the Communist in the 50s/60s decided to create simplified Chinese. Traditionalists would argue that simplified Chinese writing is not as elegant/pretty as traditional (I agree, although I have a bias as I grew up in a country that kept traditional Chinese) but the dominance of China has forced almost every other place in the world that writes in Chinese to use simplified. This includes Japan, which I believe a large majority of their signs are written in simplified version of kanji.

And this spills over into the U.S. where the Chinese who have lived here (which would consist mostly of Hong Kong and Taiwanese) are now fighting (or have fought) the recently immigrated Chinese from China over which system to use in U.S. schools.

So there is a lot of pride, but maybe not in the way you believe.

[amake]

> This includes Japan, which I believe a large majority of their signs are written in simplified version of kanji.

Japanese simplification has some overlap with Chinese, but overall they are not the same, and the simplification was definitely not "forced" on Japan by China.

[desdiv]

To add to that, China's simplification process happened during the 50s and 60s, back when China was deeply impoverished, had massive famines thanks to the Great Leap Forward[0], and had basically zero international influence (didn't even have a UN seat). They weren't in a position to influence Japan in any way. Not to mention that Japan was in the opposite camp during the Cold War.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

[swang]

I mean what you're saying is correct, but I never said China instantly switched everyone over to simplified once China decided in the 50s/60s.

I am saying the superpower it has since become has "forced" most other countries to defer to using simplified rather than traditional.

[swang]

After looking this up, yeah you are right. I just assumed there was a conversion of Traditional->Simplified for the most part because I had noticed earlier in my life that most of the written forms of kanji (I saw) were written in traditional form and only towards the past decade or so have I noticed that there were more characters that looked "simplified"

[mazerackham]

Lol, I wouldn't call it out as pride. There might simply be no reason to change. Ideas have been expressed in the written language for thousands of years, and I believe that it's probably as efficient as English. Very different, but similar levels of efficiency. Would it be "pride" if Chinese people questioned why English was full of inconsistencies and why don't they just change those aspects of the language?

At the same time, English is a required subject in Chinese, and hopefully as that improves, people here will get the pros (and cons) of both systems.