Chinese - the only script of its kind?

1. 'Script' means the writing system. I'm not dealing with its sounds whatnot here. And I believe it's the same script across the different dialects like Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.

2. My idea of Chinese script includes all variants like traditional, simplified, kanji, hanja, and any I may have missed out. They're all based on the same concept of pictographs or whatever.

So. Main discussion. The current Chinese writing system is derived from pictographs used thousands of years ago by some holy(read:mad) people who tried to make messages from spirits out of cracks in a burning piece of bone. It's undergone many changes for ease of writing, standardisation and stuff like that. Now the characters look nothing like what they were supposed to be. Also, the characters only carry meaning, not pronunciation. The Chinese script has no fixed set of, er, 'characters' for you to mix and match and put together to form meaningful strings. It's closer to repetitive drawing than writing than so many other scripts found throughout the world.

The Latin alphabet and its derivatives work with a bunch of letters that represent sounds and together form meaningful words. All those Indian and Southeast Asian languages, too. Korea has left Hanja in favour of Hangul, which also works on this principle. So do the Japanese syllabaries, Hiragana and Katakana. Heck, you can form a simple sentence out of Hiragana alone. However, Japan has yet to forsake Kanji, but that is an issue better left for another thread.

Isn't the Chinese script such a PAIN when learning Chinese or Japanese? Why is it that the rest of the (surviving) world went with phonetics, but not China? Even the Japanese made those syllabaries to make things easier when they acquired the Chinese script. What system would you prefer?

tl;dr: None! I'm only taking responses from people who bother to read through the whole thing.

Japanese don't want to make things easier, especially not to foreigners.

Also, the Japanese language has a huge number of homophones. Suffice to say that you can't differentiate "high speed" from "the speed of light" just by saying the word (Kousoku). Of course, the kanji are different when writing it.

I don't know about other Chinese languages, but a phonetic system cannot work for Mandarin because there are FAR too many homophones.  It simply doesn't work.  And honestly, learning the characters really isn't that hard, especially if you are studying simplified.

>>3
Is that why texting is so popular? Because spoken Mandarin is completely unintelligible?

Isn't the Chinese script such a PAIN when learning Chinese or Japanese?

Not for me. Actually, the kanji have been the most interesting and rewarding part of learning Japanese. It's not that difficult to learn them, although it does take a lot of time and repetition to memorize them properly, which can be a huge turn off for many people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

(warning, I am gonna use simplified in my post, so anybody who doesn't like that should probably not read or something :3)


>>1
>Also, the characters only carry meaning, not pronunciation.

This isn't totally true. While a good number of characters are made up of parts that are

"pictographic" 日 sun, 木 tree, 象 elephant

 or "ideographic" (people will bicker over the basic definition of this, but I think it's fair to say that anything that it is anything that represents something without being a literal drawing)   日 sun and 月 moon = 明 meaning bright, or clear.



These parts can also be used not for their meaning, but for their pronunciation (sometimes lost due to sounds shifting, but a great many survive in modern standard Chinese). Take 马 for example, pronounced "ma" and meaning horse. It's also used in
妈 (mother)
吗 (question word)
码 (stone)

All of which don't have anything to do with horses, but are all pronounced "ma".


The radical system is much more intricate than my (poor) explanation, and academics still debate what percentage are phonetic vs ideographic. Often this can even focus on specific characters. 虾 shrimp "xia" is 虫 insect + 下, also pronounced xia and meaning below. Is the 下 there because shrimps are insects "below" the sea, or because of the shared pronunciation? Both?



TLDR:  Don't think of characters as components, think of radicals as components. Sorry in advanced for any blatant typos/errors.

>>6
Why do people always post this as if it is relevant to the discussion?