AFAIK (maybe someone can correct or confirm) it is essential for studying law in Korea. To avoid ambiguity with identically sounding words, Chinese characters are used in law.
This is the reason Chinese characters are not going away. It is essential to comprehending written documents, because the Chinese language (and similars) have too many sounds that are the same or very similar for different words. So, if they abolish the characters and use something purely phonetic they'll have to reinvent the whole language to be understandable, especially for anything that is not colloquial.
This is not a problem in other languages. The word "set" in English has 7 different meanings, yet you rarely struggle to tell which is intended. If the language can be understood when spoken, it can be understood when written phonetically.
But it is that easy. Pinyin has a standard notation for the tones of words. Your position on this matter cannot seriously be "if it were possible to write Chinese phonetically, the Chinese alphabet would no longer exist".
Their position is "since it is possible to write Chinese phonetically and yet characters didn't go away, there might be more to the story" (than self-proclaimed language experts on HN think)
This is incorrect and shows a basic lack of reading comprehension. Neither I nor anyone else claimed to be a language expert. The post in question said:
> If this [writing tones] was so easy, pinyin (a standardized writing) would have replaced characters decades ago!
Which is saying that the reason Pinyin has not replaced traditional characters because it cannot accurately transcribe Chinese speech.
As the previous comment says, you're the one with reading comprehension problems. The topic of discussion is the replacement of Chinese characters with a phonetic writing. I said that pinyin already exists and it has not replaced characters, so this cannot be easy as you imagine (just writing down the phonetics of the language).
Which is your perspective, and distinct from the argument just made: that if it was possible to write Chinese tones, the traditional characters would have been replaced. It's obvious that the characters are not replaced due to cultural factors, rather than the inability to come up with a system that can transcribe Chinese speach.
Easy to understand for a fluent speaker, but a learner might struggle.
We saw back when we had keypad phones, the youth would write "txt" speak because it was faster to type with 10 digits. I'm pretty sure there was a decline in literacy rate around this time, the youth struggled with spelling because they wrote rarely, but texted frequently. Smartphones fixed that problem, because they provide the full keyboard and auto-correct.
My guess is, if you took the tones out of pinyin, then a generation or two later there would be less literacy. Children would struggle to add the tones even though they know how to speak the word. Writing already contains far less information than speech. Over several more generations, the speech could even change because the written word has lost the tonal information. Compared to the past, we read far more, speak less, and write even less, and most writing has been replaced by typing.
Most importantly, you can always pick a simple, predictable sentence, or one with enough redundancy to "prove" that point. Some everyday simple sentences might work in pinyin even without the accents for tones. Try an excerpt from a patent application and I'm sure even with tones you'll fail.
> mchncl lmt xsts t th wdth f sngl xhst prt, t bt 62% f th br dmtr fr rsnbl pstn rng lf.
> Th rd vlv s smpl bt ffctv frm f chck vlv
That's just from a Wikipedia page I have open from earlier. Already quite a bit harder to decipher.
I don't have a dog in this fight one way or the other, but it really is surprising that all these pro-kanji comments seem to ignore the concept of context altogether. It's very circular reasoning being used to try and explain why kanji are necessary.
Good luck convincing 1.5 billion people that they need to reinvent a language they have used for thousands of years in order to satisfy somebody else...
It seems there's room for "legal innovation" there, by providing definitions early on in various texts to disambiguate, and then sticking to them throughout the text!?
I assume it's already done anyway for some terms. Why isn't this more widespread?
But that's the opposite of innovation? Basically, instead of describing things in detail drafters opt to use shortcuts, but that's how people end up getting fucked in court by some "technicality".
Innovation would be to just put in the verbiage, precisely define terms, fuck tradition.
For what it's worth, writing Japanese on a normal keyboard is easy, even for me. Fast too. And my wife is super-fast.
I have no knowledge of how this is done in Chinese, or Korean for that matter (not to mention other non-Latin languages like Arabic, Thai or Hebrew), but for Japanese it's easy. There are two main ways of doing it, some prefer one, some the other.
