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| 3,000 years ago, the character for "Ox, a pretty good pictogram. Looks like it does today. And is understood the same, no matter how you pronounce it |
My cross-linguistic pun. “Niu” is the Mandarin pinyin pronunciation of the character:
It beings to mind one of the advantages of China’s pictographic language, over an alphabetic one: everyone can recognise the character and know it means “Ox”, no matter how they pronounce it.
Another example: 你 is pronounced “Ni “ in Mandarin and “Lei” in Cantonese but in both cases means “you”. 我 is pronounced "Wo" in Mandarin and "Ngo" in Cantonese, but in both cases means "I" or "me". 永 is pronounced "Yong" in Mandarin and "Wing" in Cantonese, but in both cases means "Forever". And so on.
[I’ll add a bit more later. Right now I’m prepping dinner, Asian-style salmon and stir-fried veges]
ADDED:
Here: An answer to the question "Why does China remain one of the few countries not to transfer to an alphabet-system of writing".
[Me: to which I would add: that it helps memorise. I can more easily recall poetry in Chinese than in English. And that's for someone who learnt Chinese as an adult. If that's the case for me, it must even more be the case for native speakers]
Also: the answer below is not the one I was looking for which highlighted the unifying effect of Chinese characters on Qin-dynasty China. Every character was recognised for its meaning, whatever the pronunciation of it.
Because Chinese writing system is actually better than phonetic alphabet system.
"Switch to phonetic alphabet" is an obsolete idea. The current trend is opposite. We are encouraged to use MORE Chinese characters in daily life. If current trend continues, Chinese character will never be abolished, instead, some languages will adopt Chinese characters.
In the past, we had computers or machines with very limited computing power and couldn't handle thousands of characters. Some countries had very limited education resource, so they thought their children cannot afford to learn thousands of characters. So it's understandable that some people wanted to abolish use of Chinese characters.
These days, situation is completely different. Machines have no problem to handle Chinese characters. Education system has became mature and is capable of achieving near 100% literacy. So there is no reason to move to phonetic one.
People are increasingly becoming aware of the advantage of Chinese characters. These are some of the advantages of Chinese characters:
1) Chinese characters can be understood almost instantly, because they are logograms, which is not so different from pictograms. Given this picture:
What came up in your mind? This pictogram has lots of information. With chinese characters, everything is apparent like this pictogram, once you take a glance at the characters. We have equivalent of "Pictogram common language which has the ability to describe almost all possible ideas on humanity"
For example, Japan employs both Chinese characters and phonetic alphabet in their writing system at the same time. However, road signs in Japan are mostly in Chinese characters because reading speed is crucial. They know Chinese characters are faster to understand. Their phonetic alphabet isn't widely used in road signs.
2) The characters contain meanings not sounds, so we can communicate beyond the language boundaries. It's another advantage of pictogram and humanity use it everywhere like airports, etc.
3) People have access to their own history.
4) Far less need to consult dictionary when it comes to technical, medical, jurisdictional terms. Elementary learners cannot understand the word “felony” or “diabetes” while “重罪(=heavy crime)” or “糖尿病(=sugar urine disease)” only contain fairly basic characters. It's crucial for Korean native speakers, because once they buy something in drug store, they sometimes have to consult dictionaries when they want to read medical description. In China or Japan, it never happens because chinese characters have meaning. Dictionaries of native tongue is exclusive to scholarly usage, in China or Japan.
5) Chinese characters are easier to learn if you start learning it younger. Because each characters have meanings, kids actually acquire them very quickly, than the meaningless phonetic one. My 2 year old son reads around 1500 characters already. In fact, Japan has higher literacy than neighbors thanks to the characters with meaning.
South Korea is reviving chinese character education in their elementary school system. Currently, educated Korean are able to read some 500 to 1000 Chinese characters. In the future, it's predictable that the number increases to 1500 or so because they start learning younger. 1500 is sufficient for daily life use. North Korea has never stopped Chinese character education because Kim Il-Sung wanted to do so. Mainland China proposed to switch to pinyin writing system, which failed. They wanted further simplification of hanzis, which also failed. Japan has been expanding their "Ordinary used character list (Joyo Kanji list)" again and again. This means they are using actually more Chinese Characters than before. Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc ... Still using traditional system and has no intention to switch to simplified one. Nowadays, thanks to computer systems, typing traditional characters requires exactly same amount of time compared to simplified one. Clearly, trend is to use more Chinese characters, not less.
Theoretically, humanity needs better writing system. What is better one? The better writing system should bring out human's ability into use. Chinese characters requires several tables in your mind: "picture <-> meaning" "picture <-> phonetics" "writing stroke <-> meaning" so it's a huge investment. Humanity is capable of doing this. The return on the investment is really high. In the developed countries, we can afford that investment. Humanity has reached a point where we can afford complex table for every citizen to accelerate faster and deeper communication. Why don't we do this? Chinese character have exactly every aspect of what we need on "next generation's writing system."
TL;DR, Stop arguing of abolishing Chinese characters. It's time to argue how we can utilize more out of Chinese characters.
