Yes, and in between the former and latter, there was also a short-lived attempt to simplify characters further [0]. It failed, perhaps because it was completely contrived, whereas the first simplification adopted many existing cursive/shorthand conventions of the time. Unofficial conventions are easier to adopt, and Japan's independent Kanji simplification scheme actually ended up with some of the same exact (simplified) characters (e.g. 與→与, 學→学, 國→国).

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chi...

It should be called Phoenicianization as you know.. That's where the concept of an alphabet and linear writing system comes from.

Writing has been invented several times independently, and AFAIK every culture that invented it made the jump to more phonetic writing (alphabetic/syllabic), at least partially, except China (well, maybe Indus valley).

How many cultures independently invented writing? By most accounts it’s either 3 or 4 times. English comes from a long family of alphabet writers, all the way back to Sumerian writing.

> Latinization

It's been always puzzling to me why borrowing Latin alphabet is usually considered today the only option. Many languages have phonetic alphabets of their own. Why is it that in the past people had no issue creating an original alphabet well suited for the language, and now the choice is between some bastardized form of Latin on the one hand and sticking to the inconvenient archaic writing system (however beautiful it looks) on the other.

It's English that has the bastardized Latin!

Things like "ough" for /a:f/, and vowel shifts whereby /a/ gets written "u".

Compared to that, some languages have sane Latinization.

Since English is so pervasive, people round the world can look at it and feel good about their own Latinization.

> It's been always puzzling to me why borrowing Latin alphabet is usually considered today the only option. Many languages have phonetic alphabets of their own.

The Latin alphabet is the most popular phonetic alphabet, and keyboards (and formerly typewriters) for it are widely available. Not so for many of the others.

I can see that being a major motivation for Latinization, especially for smaller languages.

The argument that Chinese writing has to be made phonetic because Chinese is too hard only holds sway to non-Chinese. Most Chinese people do not consider Chinese writing to be too hard. Therefore the most common argument for phonetic writing is compatibility with international standards. As of now the Latin alphabet is the international standard.

> only holds sway to non-Chinese.

Well, I'd say it holds sway to learners that a) know a better system, and b) learn as adults. Both factors allow them to form a better judgment than kids that don't know any better.

Except all Chinese speakers in the current generation are taught Pinyin in school.

And many speakers write characters (on their computer or devices) using Pinyin, and forget how to write rare characters, see

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia

* http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=25291 (and the articles linked from it)

Yes and English speakers forget the spelling of rare words, especially if they were to spend extended periods of time using nothing but text-to-speech.

Those that do use Pinyin to write on their computers also know that the large number of homophones makes it an order of magnitude slower than using radical based input methods to directly type the characters such as Canjie, Wubi, Boshiamy etc.

Completely agree, see the mess that's been made in Kazakhstan: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-4312681...

Pinyin or Bopomofo [0] doesn't really matter what symbols are used.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

The anger isn't towards Pinyin specifically, but towards attempts to switch the writing system to phonetic writing.

Pinyin is still taught in schools today starting from preschool. Most of the current generation of Chinese people are familiar with both and the common sentiment is that truly phonetic writing systems aren't practical, and that CCP attempts to use Pinyin as a "real" writing system were misguided and yet another example of the government trying to destroy Chinese culture.

> "If you actually talk to any Chinese people you'll realize that most are very opposed to the Latinization of the writing system."

Bopomofo isn't Latin characters...

But it's still phonetic.

I wonder if there's something about Chinese language that makes phonetic writing somehow less suitable for it. What about a possibility of a syllabic system?

The problem isn't Chinese in general, but the written register of Chinese specifically, and all the texts already using it. If you've ever looked at a verbatim transcript of a spontaneous conversation, you'll probably have noticed how much of an incoherent mess spoken language can be. Written speech is much tidier, because people have the opportunity to be very deliberate in what they write down.

For Chinese in particular, that means that people can be much more succinct in writing than orally, because the characters provide additional disambiguation beyond just indicating the pronunciation. Any purely phonetic writing system would require everyone to readjust their standard of what kind of sentences are comprehensible.

DeFrancis book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy is excellent on that and many related questions [1].

First, Mandarin has no inflection (love/loves), which allows for writing in characters in the first place. Then, Mandarin has a fairly impoverished phonetic system, allowing for only about 400 different syllables ignoring tones, or 1200 or so when distinguishing tones (while English for example has some 7000 or so, without tones). This leads to many homophones, which can be distinguished by being written with different characters. Or so the traditional justification goes (I don't think much of that argument, because clearly people can speak to each other just fine, without having to clarify which word they mean - disambiguation happens by longer words (two or more syllables), which you could just write down. What happens is that in writing, you only need to write parts of a word: spoken out loud it would be ambiguous, but the chosen character disambiguates it, and thus people conclude that writing wouldn't work without the characters.)

However, arguably it's just a matter of habit (and resistance on the part of those that have already put in the time and effort to learn the characters). There are, in fact, Sinitic languages written alphabetically, eg Dungan [2].

The whole issue is very politicised, as you can see with the animated discussion here and the vigorous resistance to the initial comment (which was a bit unfortunately phrased, in my view, but fundamentally sound: Chinese is a very hard language to learn, mostly by virtue of its archaic writing system, and that is arguably somewhat deliberate.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_and...

[2] see the articles linked from here: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=40417

>just a matter of habit

That's a vast understatement. Adopting a writing system that would render everything written in the formal register incomprehensible isn't exactly a tenable position.

Europeans used to write in Latin, which is now incomprehensible to most, and yet, it has all worked out.

But granted, the transition took a while and was not just a matter of habit.

Having said that, why could one not publish important classic texts in a phonetic vernacular version, and leave the study of the originals to those with the inclination (just as most people in the West do not learn Hebrew, ancient Greek, and Latin; yet can find versions of the Bible, Euclid, Seneca, and Newton that they can read if they so desire.)

You're drawing a false analogy here, the problem isn't that phonetic writing isn't capable of rendering classical texts; the problem is that they can't competently render any text written in the formal register.

So, here we get to the fundamental issue then: Chinese seems to have a larger divergence between spoken and written register than most other languages (particularly alphabetically written ones).

It's unclear to me how far that extends. (This issue seems intertwined with the issue that many speakers of other Chinese "dialects"/"languages" also use Standard Written Chinese (ie Mandarin), btw.)

It is possible to write some register of Chinese in phonetic writing, though - that's shown by Dungan (written in Cyrillic), by the experiments in the 30s (quoting Mao again: "we have begun experimenting with Hsin Wen Tzu—Latinized Chinese. It is now used in our Party school, in the Red Academy, in the Red Army, and in a special section of the Red China Daily News."), etc.

Characters can be mapped to their phonetic equivalents no?

Yeah, but not back (in other words, a mechanical mapping won't preserve sufficient information to disambiguate). It's definitely not trivial.

But they can't be mapped back.

Yes, that something is homophony. Mandarin has 1522 syllables when you include tone (413 syllables without). [0] English has 15,831. [1]

[0] https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/14596/how-many-s... [1] http://semarch.linguistics.fas.nyu.edu/barker/Syllables/inde... [via wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20091115065840/http://semarch.li...]

Chinese characters are syllabic.