Reading speed in Chinese

Not true. You're forgetting that those are not letters. Each hanzi represents a complete syllable with an average of about three phonemes. So you have to compare the speed of writing one character with the speed of writing three letters.

But furthermore, Chinese is more economical with its syllables since it stripped itself of inflections and nearly meaningless words like articles and prepositions. It takes about ten English syllables to express what Chinese can do with seven. So you have to compare the speed of writing seven characters with the speed of writing thirty letters. It's starting to sound like a much closer contest.

More importantly they carry a lot of culture with them. Each character is composed of one or more radicals (each of which can stand alone as a character), with several other brushstrokes, many of which form additional radicals. As a result the character displays some of the history of the word and of the culture in which it evolved. That will be lost in a phonetic alphabet.

I can't disagree but then I tried to learn them when I was 26. Everything is easier to learn when you're young and your neural pathways have not yet been cast in concrete. Chinese are expected to know 1,000 of them at the end of the fourth grade, and almost every adult knows at least 3,000. Even Japanese people have to learn 2,000 to be able to read their strange mixture of characters, phonetic syllables, and Roman letters.

As noted, this is usually referred to as the Roman alphabet, although "Latin" will do.

The Greek alphabet has only 24 letters and is barely adequate for writing Modern Greek. The Roman alphabet isn't even barely adequate for the phonetic complexity of English. We have many more than 26 phonemes, which is why it's a joke to call English writing "phonetic." Most languages that use the Roman alphabet augment it with new letters (German ß, Danish æ), mangled letters (Turkish ı, Norwegian ø), diacritical marks (Spanish ñ, Romanian ş), or all of the above (my browser menu lists ử, but I have no idea what language it's from).

Nonetheless, Chinese scholars long ago developed the Pin-Yin romanization system, which expresses all of the language's phonemes using the 26 letters of our alphabet. There are only three digraphs for consonants (SH, CH, ZH) and one diacritical mark (Ü), but all of the vowels do double or even triple duty because only one of them could be used in a given location. Still, it's a pretty clean system, fairly intuitive (to the limited extent that English and Chinese phonemes correspond at all) and easy to learn.

Of course the problem is that there's no way to transcribe tone with the Roman alphabet. When Chinese words and names are transliterated for the Western press (Mao Zedong, Tian An Men) they leave the tones out because they know we're not going to pronounce them anyway. But for their own readers who have to know which word it is, they have to put them in. So here we come with four diacritical marks to put over the vowels (ā, á, ă, à). This writing is not "pretty."

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I suppose, but who writes by hand any more? I do it so rarely that I've lost my muscle skills and I write worse than a doctor. I have to block-print the addresses on envelopes and the amounts on checks and that is really slow. Most Westerners find the idea difficult to believe, but Chinese has word processors too. There's a logic to the characters and it doesn't take any more keystrokes to code a Chinese printed word than its equivalent in English.

Hehe. After all we use Greek letters in math. I like the Cyrillic alphabet.

Foreign writing always looks a little exotic or romantic. The Irish alphabet looks like there are leprechauns behind the letters, but it's really nothing more than the Roman alphabet in an unusual font.

I'm not sure that's unique. I think Turkish (which is in the same family) also has that distinction. Czech comes very close; OU and CH are digraphs.

A question no one has ever answered: Is accent (syllabic stress) phonemic in Finnish? If so, is it invariant (like always falling on the first syllable in Czech or the penultimate in Polish) so it doesn't need to be written? If not, then there's a missing phonetic component to the alphabet. Spanish takes care of that with a written accent mark if it's not in the standard place.

Or is accent non-existent like in Chinese?

 

They're not dialects. Dialects by definition are mutually intercomprehensible. To be precise, there are dialects of Mandarin such as Sichuan speech, and a person from Beijing and a (rather old) person from Chengdu can communicate with about as much effort as a Texan and a Brummy. But what Westerners refer to as "dialects," like Cantonese, Shanghai or Fujian speech, are distinct languages. The reason they all use the same words in the same order, despite the phonetic drift, is that the shared written language has held them together as a community for several thousand years. This is yet another reason that the written language has tremendous cultural and emotional value and they will not give it up easily.

Nonetheless, since the communist takeover, Mandarin has become the official language of the entire country. It has been taught to all children in virtually all schools for about thirty years, and virtually all classes have been conducted in Mandarin for about twenty years. Older people who were not taught Mandarin have tremendous opportunity to learn it from radio and TV, their children and grandchildren, public officials, etc., and tremendous motivation to learn it in order to understand those broadcasts and conduct business.

It must be borne in mind that learning Mandarin is not nearly as much of a challenge to a person from Fujian or Guangdong as it is to an English speaker. There are no puzzling differences in grammar, syntax and idioms to struggle with. It's just the same words, pronounced differently. For many older Americans, learning Russian or even German is too difficult to be worth the trouble. For an older person from Shanghai, learning Mandarin is more like learning a secret code than a foreign language.

It's difficult to find statistics, but ten years ago more than half the people in China were already able to speak Mandarin. This percentage will continue to increase as some old people pick it up it and others die off to be replaced by young people who were required to learn it in childhood.

By the time China begins taking seriously the idea of converting to a phonetic writing system, everyone will know Mandarin.

 

This would be trivial with Mandarin because you don't need a heuristic spelling decoder or a voice synthesizer. That would be the wrong way to approach this language.

They've already got the character set coded for word processors--at least the "Fenn 5,000" that are all you need if you're not going to read ancient poetry. There are only 1,600 different syllables possible with the language's phonetic structure. All they need to do is map each of the 5,000 characters to its pronunciation, and that's already been done with the Pinyin phonetic romanization system. And then let some lady with a lovely voice and perfect diction record them. Double-check it for errors and you're finished in a couple of weeks. Maybe a year if you let the government do it.

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It's NETalk with three capital letters and only one T, and it's Sejnowski, a Polish surname.

 

And that's the problem. It's sad to take private property for public projects, and even in the USA it has gotten out of control as municipalities seize people's homes for the vague purpose of "the public good," meaning that a profit-making baseball stadium or shopping mall will bring in more tax revenue to enlarge the inept, unaccountable, self-serving bureaucracy.

But in China they don't even have to do environmental reviews, which even the smallest subway station project has to undergo here. The Three Gorges Dam destroyed megatons of historical artifacts and is driving treasured freshwater dolphin species to extinction. Since safety isn't a big issue in an economy driven by bribery, it's not clear how long it will be before this dam collapses and causes massive loss of life and environmental damage. And the sad thing is that it provides something like 3% of China's electrical consumption, which grows every year.

Fortunately the project to convert to a phonetic alphabet will probably not displace homeowners or kill off an endangered species.

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They're not letters. Each character is a morpheme, and on the average I'd say it carries the information content of four or five phonetic letters. There are only 5,000 characters in a university-level Chinese vocabulary, versus 17,000 combinations of only three English letters, many of which are invalid, so I wonder which character set is in fact faster to interpret visually.

Nonetheless I have to disagree with this. Many of them have ten or more strokes, compared to three or four in a phonetic alphabet. It's much harder to develop the pattern recognition.

But as easy or hard as they might be, you have to learn at least 1,000 to be able to read at the most basic level, and three or four thousand to qualify as "literate." That's quite a task compared to even the 32 letters in the Russian alphabet.

English and French are particularly difficult because of the poor correlation between spelling and pronunciation, but still any foreigner who can understand spoken English or French can learn to read a newspaper in a fraction of the time it takes to accomplish the same feat in Chinese.