/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.

>>45
Korean has more sounds than Japanese, and it allows more sounds in each syllable than Japanese does. That's how Japanese can have so many homonyms, like "kami" (meaning "god", "hair" or "paper"). And that's a Japanese word, not a Chinese loan.

Oh, and that's 46 _syllables_, not _sounds_.

Also, Chinese loanwords aren't so much "inadequately transliterated" as they were taken into the language centuries ago, at a time when they were pronounced differently. After all, languages change over time; for example, the name of China's (current) capital was actually pronounced "Peking" some 2-3 centuries ago. "Beijing" is the modern pronunciation.

Which is also why modern Chinese have all these two-syllable words these days, put together of two synonyms to make a phonetically distinct word, to avoid homonyms in awkward places.