And there are other tradeoffs. Chinese writing is much more compact and easier to read, relative to alphabetic writing. A layer of translation has been removed.
I'm not convinced that learning to write Chinese with a "literate" vocabulary is substantially harder than achieving equivalent literacy in a language with alphabetic writing. It might look easier to you if you've never learned both. But proof is in the pudding - China's literacy rate is on par with Western literacy rates, for similar educational effort.
Well, that's precisely the claim that is under dispute. For example, DeFrancis [1] aims to dispel what he calls
"The Successfulness Myth: Chinese characters are responsible for a high level of literacy in East Asian countries. (A weaker version of this myth is simply that despite the flaws of Chinese characters, East Asian countries still have a high level of literacy.)"
He makes the opposite claim that (from the Wikipedia summary)
"The Chinese script, with its huge number of characters, its complexity and its irregularities, is harmful to the literacy improvement efforts of the Chinese society, and needs to be replaced by a more efficient writing system if China is to achieve the benefits of modernization."
There is, in other words, serious scholarly dispute about the success of the Chinese script.
> Chinese writing is much more compact and easier to read, relative to alphabetic writing
Agreed on the first part, it's more compact (not surprising if you have ten thousands of choices per character, say 14 bits, instead of 26, or 5 bits). But I don't think it's easier to read (let alone write), and I'd want to see evidence for that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language%3A_Fact_a...
For what it's worth, my spouse has a Master's degree in Chinese pedagogy. I've not heard such arguments from her. A single book, weighed against observation, isn't proof.
Sure, English has pretty horrible orthography, arguably the worst among alphabetic languages (though it's not that easy to reform, either, see eg. [1]). But it's still more phonetic than Chinese. Spanish has a beautiful orthography, and pretty close correspondence between written and spoken word.
"Chinese characters are so difficult to learn that even the best system of rudimentary characters, or simplified teaching, does not equip the people with a really rich and efficient vocabulary. Sooner or later, we believe, we will have to abandon characters altogether if we are to create a new social culture in which the masses fully participate." "We believe Latinization is a good instrument with which to overcome illiteracy."
This was said by Mao Zedong (oh, dang, that's so ambiguous, I mean 毛泽东) in 1936, see [2].
"This has led many Chinese in the past to advocate the abolition of characters in favor of an alphabetic system, but such programs have met with little success." [3]
So, the idea that the Chinese writing system is too cumbersome is by no means new, or "Western", for what it's worth.
> A single book, weighed against observation, isn't proof
Well, no. But there is more than a single book, there are decades of discussion and scholarship on this.
It's conceivable to me that China could benefit from a move to alphabetic writing, and translations of Classical Chinese into vernacular (and anyone who wants can go study characters and Classical Chinese texts in the original, just like anyone in the West can go learn Latin and ancient Greek and Hebrew and read the classics in the original, or the Bible, for that matter).
[1] https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/accents_spellingreform...
[2] http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing...
[3] http://sites.asiasociety.org/education/VISIBLE_TRACES/curric...
>It's conceivable to me that China could benefit from a move to alphabetic writing, and translations of Classical Chinese into vernacular
The issue is not that classical texts become illegible, the issue is that all written language becomes illegible. For example, in the other DeFrancis source you provide, he uses the term "shuangwenzhi", the meaning of which I simply could not figure out. I saw the English "digraphia" below, at which point I assume he may have meant "双文zhi" but I am still unclear what he meant by "zhi". As of right now only 66% of the phrase he used has any semantical meaning and I am still unclear as to what he meant to say by "shuangwenzhi". Without the English translation I don't think I would've deduced any of the semantic meaning of that term.
>So, the idea that the Chinese writing system is too cumbersome is by no means new,
You are correct, this argument isn't new, it's outdated.
The emergence of smart ubiquitous always-connected computers (with Unicode) does change the evaluation maybe.
I think one of the fundamental arguments against the Chinese script (it takes about twice as long to learn than alphabetic writing) stands, while others are outdated, indeed (nobody struggles with building Chinese typewriters anymore).
However, there are many arguments put forward against switching to an alphabetic script that strike me as misguided (that the Chinese language is so special, that it has so many homonyms, that characters are uniquely suited to it and indeed indispensable, that it allows speakers of different "dialects" to communicate, etc.).
At any rate, good discussion.
Agreed.
English orthography, summed up, is: all the orthographies from all the languages from all the time periods cobbled together into a monster.
An opinion on the Chinese language from 1984 is not applicable in 2018, pretending that it does is disingenuous.
I'm still sorry for all those kids having to spend years of their childhood on characters, but maybe one can see it as a character forming exercise.
It's an extraordinary claim that learning 6000 symbols is just as easy as learning 26 symbols (hey, make it 52, or, since we're on HN, 128 or even 256 :-)