The long, tortuous and fascinating process of creating a Chinese font

Re:The long, tortuous and fascinating process of creating a ... by ilamont on Sunday April 15, 2018 @08:29PM (#16845860)

Quick answer: China does have a romanization system called pinyin for the Mandarin dialect which is quite accurate as long as you know the tones. Problems:

* Pinyin can't be used for other dialects, meaning someone in Guangzhou won't understand written pinyin.

* There are only something like 400 sounds in Mandarin, which means there are a lot of homonyms which makes pinyin not suitable in certain contexts.

* Switching a highly literate society with more than a billion people to a different writing system would be a massive undertaking.

The Vietnamese made such a switch from Chinese characters to a Romanization system based on Portuguese, but at a time when literacy in Chinese characters was relatively low and a colonial power (France) dominated the country and its bureaucracy.

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Re:The long, tortuous and fascinating process of creating a ... by on_and_off on Sunday April 15, 2018 @09:02PM (#16845985)

I am not speaking about romanization, although it would surely be nice if all the cultures in the world used the same writing system. I am referring to what korea did with hangul.

Of course you address some of the pain points like the fact that China is way more literate than Korea was when Hangul was introduced.

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