If English was written like Chinese (1999)
Imagining English written with Chinese-style characters prompts a wider exploration of how different writing systems shape language, literacy, and culture. Commenters compare logographic Chinese with alphabetic systems, discuss tools like pinyin, bopomofo, kana, and hangul, and weigh the trade-offs between phonetic ease, semantic density, and cross-dialect readability. The thread also touches on how politics, history, and standardization determine what gets called a “language” or a “dialect,” and why China and Japan have kept character-based scripts while Korea and others moved to alphabets.
How Chinese-style writing maps (or doesn’t) to English
- Several commenters note the article’s core analogy works pedagogically, but English lacks Chinese’s “one syllable ≈ one morpheme” structure, so a hanzi-like system fits poorly.
- English syllables like “ran” or “dom” rarely carry standalone meaning, unlike typical Chinese syllables, so building meaning-bearing characters per syllable would be artificial.
- Some wonder to what extent Chinese’s morphology was shaped by its script versus preexisting features.
Phonetic tools vs logographs (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)
- Chinese uses tools like Zhuyin (bopomofo) and romanization (pinyin) for phonetics and input, but adults almost never write extended text in them; characters remain the main output.
- Opinions differ on bopomofo’s real-world importance: some say it’s marginal and mostly educational; others report it’s still widely used in Taiwan for IMEs and children’s books.
- Japanese and Korean historically used Chinese characters; Japanese kept kanji plus kana, while Korean largely abandoned hanja in favor of hangul.
- There is debate whether kanji make Japanese easier or harder:
- Pro-kanji: reduce ambiguity and help segment text; kana-only prose feels exhausting.
- Anti-kanji: massively raises learning burden and reading uncertainty; Korean shows a clean alphabetic system can work well.
Homophones, tones, and ambiguity
- Chinese has many homophones; logographs and tones carry heavy disambiguation load.
- Some argue phonetic writing would become incomprehensible; others counter that spoken communication already works, and tones can be written.
- Several point to the famous “lion-eating poet” poem to illustrate how phonetic-only text can be near-impossible to parse in Chinese.
Dialects, “one Chinese,” and politics
- Strong thread on “Chinese” as one language vs many:
- Linguistically, many “dialects” (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) are mutually unintelligible.
- In practice, they share a common written standard based on one spoken variety.
- Logographs allow cross-dialect reading of the same text even when pronunciations diverge, though vernacular written Cantonese or Shanghainese can be opaque without knowing those languages.
- Commenters highlight that labeling varieties as “languages” or “dialects” is often political rather than purely linguistic.
Learning difficulty, literacy, and reform
- Multiple people emphasize the enormous memorization load (thousands of characters) and say this makes literacy harder than alphabetic systems.
- Others argue the cultural depth and cross-dialect utility of characters explain their persistence and make large-scale script reform unlikely.
- Comparisons are drawn to English spelling reform and metric vs imperial: technically feasible, politically and culturally hard.