[coliveira]

This is the reason Chinese characters are not going away. It is essential to comprehending written documents, because the Chinese language (and similars) have too many sounds that are the same or very similar for different words. So, if they abolish the characters and use something purely phonetic they'll have to reinvent the whole language to be understandable, especially for anything that is not colloquial.

[James_K]

This is not a problem in other languages. The word "set" in English has 7 different meanings, yet you rarely struggle to tell which is intended. If the language can be understood when spoken, it can be understood when written phonetically.

[coliveira]

Other languages are not Chinese. In Chinese a lot of the meaning in the spoken language is conveyed through tones and other conversational cues.

[akavi]

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

[coliveira]

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

[James_K]

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".

[iforgotpassword]

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)

[fennecbutt]

I'd say nationalism is really the answer there.

[James_K]

Can you quantify this? From what I understand, Chinese speakers can understand Pinyin text even without the tone marks.

[sparkie]

nd nglsh spkrs cn ndrstnd nglsh wtht wrttn vwls.

Easy to understand for a fluent speaker, but a learner might struggle.

We saw back when we had keypad phones, the youth would write "txt" speak because it was faster to type with 10 digits. I'm pretty sure there was a decline in literacy rate around this time, the youth struggled with spelling because they wrote rarely, but texted frequently. Smartphones fixed that problem, because they provide the full keyboard and auto-correct.

My guess is, if you took the tones out of pinyin, then a generation or two later there would be less literacy. Children would struggle to add the tones even though they know how to speak the word. Writing already contains far less information than speech. Over several more generations, the speech could even change because the written word has lost the tonal information. Compared to the past, we read far more, speak less, and write even less, and most writing has been replaced by typing.

[iforgotpassword]

Most importantly, you can always pick a simple, predictable sentence, or one with enough redundancy to "prove" that point. Some everyday simple sentences might work in pinyin even without the accents for tones. Try an excerpt from a patent application and I'm sure even with tones you'll fail.

> mchncl lmt xsts t th wdth f sngl xhst prt, t bt 62% f th br dmtr fr rsnbl pstn rng lf.

> Th rd vlv s smpl bt ffctv frm f chck vlv

That's just from a Wikipedia page I have open from earlier. Already quite a bit harder to decipher.

[Suppafly]

> the youth struggled with spelling because they wrote rarely, but texted frequently

I wonder if there is any evidence of that other than boomers complaining about it.

>Over several more generations, the speech could even change because the written word has lost the tonal information.

That happens automatically with every language already. It's not like a race to the bottom where suddenly no one knows how to communicate though.

>Compared to the past, we read far more, speak less, and write even less, and most writing has been replaced by typing.

That's not necessarily a bad thing.

[Suppafly]

>This is not a problem in other languages.

I don't have a dog in this fight one way or the other, but it really is surprising that all these pro-kanji comments seem to ignore the concept of context altogether. It's very circular reasoning being used to try and explain why kanji are necessary.

[jimmaswell]

> they'll have to reinvent the whole language to be understandable

Frankly, the whole language seems like such a mess that maybe they should?

[coliveira]

Good luck convincing 1.5 billion people that they need to reinvent a language they have used for thousands of years in order to satisfy somebody else...

[James_K]

In the Chinese style of government, people don't necessarily need to be convinced of something for it to be implemented.