If English were written like Chinese (1999)

The author really knocked it out of the park with this analogy. This explained things to me that I might have learned through experience but had never been explicitly told before. He even took the time at the end to point out where his own analogy breaks down. Zhongwen.com is also a fantastic site worth a look for students of Chinese. Overall extremely impressive, creative, and interesting.

This article is actually <i>a lot</i> better at explaining the characters system used in both china and Japan, than the articles that have hit the front page today and in the last week or so.

The increasing use of icons and emoji suggests that English will become like Chinese!<p>(Ever try to look up an icon in a dictionary? This puts paid to the idea that icons are decipherable by people who don&#x27;t know the language. Copyrighting the icons makes even that infinitely worse, as it prevents standardization.)

The letter &#x27;M&#x27; in the Roman alphabet is derived from the symbol for running water in phonecian, and the letter &#x27;A&#x27; is a rotated cow&#x27;s head.<p>Phonecian is partly derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics. I love this stuff.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Phoenician_alphabet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Phoenician_alphabet</a>

This is a fantastic guide &#x2F; insight for how Chinese characters work, and does a great deal to dispel the myth that Chinese characters are virtually random - that each individual character requires independent memorization.<p>As someone who has studied both Chinese and Japanese, this article read very fluidly. Curious how other readers have found this?

People might be interested to know that Egyptian Hieroglyphics, despite looking even more like pictograms are actually an alphabet.<p>Another cool fact, in hieroglyphics there is more than one way to write a word, because, unlike most alphabetic systems, some characters are multi syllabic and can represent two or more syllables.

[work] + [fight] + [sun] is poor Huffmanization of the common English suffix <i>-tion</i>. That&#x27;s what, 14 strokes when English just takes 7?<p>Well, maybe that was the point, though -- that the priorities of the language may change over time, and eventually you&#x27;re dealing with 2000 year old Cockney rhyming slang baked into your written language. But that&#x27;s just the opinion of one guy sitting on his Vannevar.

I&#x27;ve been waiting for years for somebody to do something like this with emoji. All we&#x27;d need is a way to add radicals and a central dictionary.

He wrote this before the rise of emoji. We may see something like this as a cell phone writing form. Teenagers would use it to be incomprehensible to olds.

One thing that is glossed over slightly in these discussions is the distinction between collections of sound-meaning compound characters where the rebus is the same but the words aren&#x27;t cognate, and where the words are cognate.<p>I&#x27;ve read in some places that the scribes attempted to use the same rebus for cognate words but I everything I could find online was a re-hashing of wikipedia (or wherever the wikipedia article is sourced from) which states &quot;However, the phonetic component is not always as meaningless as this example would suggest. Rebuses were sometimes chosen that were compatible semantically as well as phonetically.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m not sure how important this really is or how many characters that share a common rebus are cognate. But to my aesthetic senses I much prefer characters to contain etymological information than just the pronunciation when the character was first written.

Is this meant to be serious (surely not) or rather like Mark Twain&#x27;s take on spelling reform?

FYI we&#x27;re close to this with the use of acronyms and abbreviations, not just emoticons, given English&#x27;s phonetic basis, etc.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1709&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1709&#x2F;</a>

What a breath of fresh air is a 1999-era web page. Fast loading, simple, readable.