[Chathamization]

It would result in a pretty severe loss of fidelity.

You may think it’s not needed, because that information isn’t available in spoken Chinese. The same is true for written English - putting spaces between words, dividing texts into paragraphs, capitalizing them, differentiating between different pauses (a comma, period, semicolon, etc. all signifying what kind of pause something its), quotation marks, parenthesis, etc. - none of this is available in our spoken language, and we’re still able to understand it. In theory, we could get rid of them all and understand what’s being written. In practice, most people would find the result to be an incomprehensible mess.

The same goes for Chinese. Written languages, for the most part, are more than a simple transcription of spoken sounds.

[DiogenesKynikos]

> In practice, most people would find the result to be an incomprehensible mess.

Unless Chinese is somehow unique among all human languages, this isn't true. Chinese would be just as intelligible if written in a phonetic script (like Pinyin) as it is when written using the characters.

Now, it would be an incredibly shocking transition for Chinese people who have already spent their entire lives writing with characters. However, after the transition to Pinyin, especially for young people who wouldn't ever learn the characters, written Chinese would still be perfectly understandable.

That being said, I don't favor replacing the characters, because the transition would be extremely difficult and because the characters are very culturally important to China. They've been in use for a good 3000 years, and people are very attached to them. Phonetic scripts are technically superior, but the cultural and practical arguments for sticking with the characters are still stronger.

[Chathamization]

> Unless Chinese is somehow unique among all human languages, this isn't true.

I was talking about English in that paragraph:

> The same is true for written English - putting spaces between words, dividing texts into paragraphs, capitalizing them, differentiating between different pauses (a comma, period, semicolon, etc. all signifying what kind of pause something its), quotation marks, parenthesis, etc. - none of this is available in our spoken language, and we’re still able to understand it. In theory, we could get rid of them all and understand what’s being written. In practice, most people would find the result to be an incomprehensible mess.

[DiogenesKynikos]

> I was talking about English in that paragraph:

The very next sentence you wrote was

> The same goes for Chinese.

So you were talking about both English and Chinese in that sentence.

[Chathamization]

> So you were talking about both English and Chinese in that sentence.

I was talking about English in the sentence you quoted. In the next paragraph, I said that Chinese was the same as English in this regard. That's why I couldn't (and still can't) understand your comment.

You're saying it isn't true that removing those parts of English would mean "most people would find the result to be an incomprehensible mess" unless Chinese is unique? Chinese has absolutely no connection to written English becoming a mess after removing those elements of written English.

Or are you objecting to the paragraph after the one you quoted, where I say the same thing that happens in English is true for Chinese? "Unless Chinese is somehow unique among all human languages, this isn't true" that Chinese would be like English? That doesn't make any sense to me unless you misread my initial comment to mean the complete opposite of what it was saying.

[DiogenesKynikos]

It's very clear what you meant, and I don't know why you're going in circles like this.

You very clearly wrote that Chinese would become an incomprehensible mess if written in Pinyin.

You first stated that there would be a severe loss in fidelity in switching to Pinyin. Then you gave an analogy showing how removing various non-phonetic elements of written English would make it an incomprehensible mess. Immediately after that, you said that the same applies for Chinese.

I'm objecting to your argument that Chinese would be an incomprehensible mess if written alphabetically.

[Chathamization]

No, I'm genuinely confused by your claim that in order for Chinese to be similar to English in this manner, it would be "somehow unique among all human languages." These are contradictory ideas. That's why I was asking for clarity.

> I'm objecting to your argument that Chinese would be an incomprehensible mess if written alphabetically.

That's fine, but it runs directly counter to your initial comment. If a phonetic transcription would make Chinese just as easy to understand as it is written now, it would be quite different from English, and almost every other written language, all of which include non-phonetic elements in order to facilitate reading.