/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.

If Chinese was going to go phonetic, They'd have done it back when they still had consonant clusters. In Ancient chinese, there were enough possible sounds that you could have one character and one syllable to a word, and they'd all sound distinct. Chinese probably would have kept this had they a phonetic script, since writing is more conservative than speech and phonetic writing would have forced speech to change more slowly by acting as a pronounciation guideline, but they kept the characters and the pronounciation changed rapidly with no phonetic guidlines to keep it under control. Nowadays, there are only 400 sounds (before tones) in standard Mandarin, and people still need to use two characters to a word, to make sure it's all distinct. Even in speech, you sometimes have to clear up an ambuiguity by writing the character on your hand. With 650 possible sounds, and 9 distinguishing tones, perhaps Cantonese could afford to go phonetic, but if Mandarin did, everyone would just give up using it.