Not before 2046. Hong Kong people would be very averse to such a drastic change to their culture, and the government has already decided to adopt a "3 languages, 2 scripts" policy.
I think there's a big difference between traditional characters for Mandarin and their use for Cantonese. If Taiwan is united with the Mainland in a single economic zone, then I think that economies of scale will put severe pressure on traditional characters in Mandarin. I can see them becoming like Latin and Roman numerals in the West: used everywhere in coats of arms, clock faces, academic books, etc., but a secondary system, as they are on the Mainland.
I think they will survive much longer in Cantonese though, for which printed material has to be specially written anyway.
Winner said:
From purely objective, logical point of view, it seems to me that alphabetic writing systems are inherently easier than the pictographic ones. Which might be the reason why most of the world uses them.
I agree. I think people have been pretty unfair to Winner. He's wrong to describe characters as pictographs, but he's closer than people who say that you only have to learn 7 strokes. He's right to say that the use of characters does have
very serious disadvantages. The critical point is that in phonetically spelled languages like German and Czech, you need to remember:
- the meaning of the word
- the pronunciation of the word
In Chinese you need to remember:
- the meaning of the word
- the pronunciation of the word
- the characters of the word
One system is absolutely more simple than the other.
gangleri2001 said:
Mandarin has about 400 syllabes. When we add the tones to them we have about 1000 sounds. That's an extremely reduced set of syllabes that would make the adoption of an alphabetic system legaly unpractical: laws would be full of homophones, which would be the largest legal mess ever.
Firstly, is would be no more or less impractical than Chinese speech. Are Chinese people able to understand one another's speech? If they're two educated speakers of Mandarin, yes. So they can read one another's alphabetic writing.
Secondly, Dungan people
already use an alphabetic script for a language very close to Mandarin! What you say is impossible happens every day.
gangleri said:
As for flexibility, it really depends on how you see it: is it more flexible a writing system that must be adapted to other languages and that cannot be read by speakers of other languages even though they share the same writing system or a unique writing system that allows written intellegibility between languages?
Latin characters have been adapted by many different languages, and can be read by speakers of many languages. They're actually far more flexible than characters for this purpose. Books written in Shanghainese are a nightmare to read, because you're trying to write a language written in a script that wasn't designed for it.
I have experienced the phenomenon where, say, a Taiwanese speaker who doesn't understand my spoken Mandarin will ask me to write something. But that often just means their Mandarin reading is better than their Mandarin listening (especially with my terrible pronunciation!).
No, but there are other means to find a character in question using key (char can be divided in several parts and one of them is "key") and number of strokes.
It should be pointed out that this is not easy. Looking up more complex characters in a paper dictionary is seriously time-consuming. Many characters contain more than one 'key'.
