/n/ews: Pride - Why Chinese Language FAILS.

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/chinese-language-ever-evolving/

The Times recently published an article about China’s effort to manage the vast number of characters in the Chinese language. A government computer database, designed to recognize people’s names on identity cards, is programmed to read about 32,000 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, cutting out the more “obscure” characters.

This is not the first attempt to modernize a sprawling and ancient language. The most ambitious effort was the introduction of a simplified system of writing in the 1950s. As part of the Communist Party’s campaign to reduce illiteracy, simplified characters were promoted as the common written language, replacing many traditional characters.

More than five decades later, simplified characters remain the standard writing system of China, while Chinese elsewhere — especially in Taiwan and Hong Kong — continue to use traditional characters.

We asked several experts to explain the roots of this shift, and how it might affect the future course of the written language.

>38
They would have, if the move to Roman characters wasn't decided by the French rather than by Vietnamese. I guess that's what they get for not remaining independent like Japan or Korea.

>41
No, Korean is made by creating blocks of initial consonants, vowels, and sometimes final consonants to create vastly more than 46 sounds. There are some Chinese loans, but the compounds rather than the individual character values were loaned over. Japanese relies heavily on the loan of character values, and inadequately transliterated them (shi becomes shou, shu becomes shou, xiu becomes shou, etc), so there's a huge amount of homophonic compounds. Japanese probably could have abandoned Chinese characters if they hadn't decided to make half their language based on Chinese compounds, which actually were never necessary ultimately (you tend to see things like 返信 and 返事 both taking the place of 答え when 答え itself would have sufficed).