Today I came to the same conclusion to which every objective observer eventually comes: China should ditch the characters and adopt pinyin as its official writing system, with supplementary (and standardized) Latin systems for the major fang1yan2 (ie, Yue, Wu, Min, Hakka, and maybe two or three more). The cause of this revelation? I realized the lone word 'ku4' "cool" is written the character for 'ku4', "cruelty, cruel, strong (of alcohol)". That's really ridiculous, given that, instead of borrowing a rather rare zi4, you could just write the pinyin. Afterwards, I spent a couple of hours reading about all the problems han4zi4 cause for Sinitic, Japanese, and Korean speakers and readers.
Not that I'm not still fond of the devilish things.
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I told you :-)
ReplyDelete…or it should adopt a much-simplified writing system, in which each character contains 1) one of a very limited number of simple radicals indicating meaning and 2) a phonetic component that gives the exact pronunciation in 普通話