Re: Mixed writing systems (WAS: Newbie says hi)

>How much is the Roman notation for Chinese being used these days?
It is used for teaching chinese to foreigners, and to sort characher is some
dictionaries. Allmost nothing more. And actualy, chinese written in the roman
notation is hardly readable.

There are too mainy homophones in chinese, you never know which characher you are
talking about. my dictionary has an average 10 characher for each sillable.
This is average, so many ones have much more.

if you consider that most electronic or informatic systems do no handle the
diacritic notation of tones, multiply this figure by 4.

If you write english in ponetics, you will have the same writing for to two and
too. Ok, only three. but can you imagine the mess when not 3 but 40 words have
the exact same spelling?

I know many chinese who prefer to use englsih, rather than chinese with
romanisation, if they have to use a system which does not support properly
chinese writing (ICQ, for example).

The only practical usable way of using roman alphabet for chinese writing would be
to create a complex spelling system, definitly not straight-forward, so you can
make a difference between all those homophones. And I don't see the point of
having a complex spelling system, instead of a complex characher system.

More over, all chinese dialects (which could sometimes be considerer as separate
languages) share the common wrighting system, thought phonetic is considerably
different. Or to be more specific, Cantonese uses the chinese charachers plus
specifics charachers (based on the same system) for words that do not exist in
mandarin, while most other dialects (languages) do not have a written form of
their own, an only use mandarin.This is not difficult since writting only
caries the meaning, and not pronounciation. Would you remove any possibility of
writing to those languages, or create hundreds (not less, knowing how many
dialects ans languages) of different complex spelling systems? Or make every
body use the same one, and make it completely loose it's phonetic value?

Another solution would be to have a strong an sever governemental action to make all
those dialects and languages disapear, so that only one spelling system could
be used.

What ever the way you choose, I consider it impossible, and more over, without any
advantages on the current system.

I do not think an kind of writing is superior to the others. It is just more
appropriate for a language or another, and linguistic is not the only criteria,
socio-politic also have a strong impact. Chinese writing is a factor of unity
in the country, and has been used so in early history.

More over, roman writing is perceived as english(or american). Can you imagine the
humiliation for china if they had to abandon a whole part of their culture, to
addopt a foreign system? A country with thousands of year of history, a highly
refined and advance culture and civilistion is not likely to wake up one
morning, and say: "our writen language is primitive, let's ask Georges Bush
junior to devise a new one for us, because english writing system is so much
superior to our"? Personaly, I doubt.

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