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Written Chinese is ancient barbarism.

I’m going to rant on some of the problems it has, with occasional glib solutions.

I understand that using pinyin was considered and declined back in the 40s. I still think using roman characters is probably the best solution, but let’s play with the restriction of using most of the existing characters.

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First, the characters are a jumbled mess. The more complex a character is, the more difficult it is to write with a consistent quality and size. Writing 七 isn’t so hard. Good luck with 饭 or 黎. Reading is just as bad as writing. Hand writing is bad, but I have to blow up my font size to read even the best quality font on a computer.

Separate characters into parts.

Take, for example, 语 (traditional: 語). This is made of three things.

1. 讠 – this is the simplified form of the traditional 言.
2. 五

3. Either 口 or 囗. I don’t know which. There’s another problem.

So 语 could be untangled as 讠五口.

Having characters which are very visually similar has to go. It just has to. 口 versus 囗 is stupid.

Next, there are multiple meanings and pronunciations for each character. 语 has two pronunciations, each with their own meaning.

1. yǔ​ – dialect / language / speech

2. yù​ – to tell to

That’s ridiculous. Sure, such examples usually have related meanings. But still, this is awkward.

If a character is itself a word, then that character must have only one pronunciation and one meaning.

If a character can be used with other characters to form words, then life gets a little more complex I suppose.

“Side radicals” are a mutation of an existing radical/character. Maybe this was done for space consideration, but that can be untangled.

• 人 (person) has a side radical 亻. Keep things simple by always using 人.

• 心 (heart) has a side radical 忄.

More examples [ 1 ]

When a single character is used, a part of it can indicate meaning or it can indicate sound. When multiple characters are used, one of the words can indicate meaning or it can indicate sound. Which does what, when? Who knows!

Clearly identify meaning versus sound characters. How? No clue. But the meaning character(s) ought to be noted first, and then a sound character.

Previously, it would be fairly easy to see when multiple distinct characters are joined to make a word.

So our imaginary word 语语 has two characters. Separating these characters becomes messy.

语语 => 讠五口讠五口

The separateness can be made clear by having each expanded-character separated with some mark. Perhaps something like this:

语语 => 讠五口.讠五口

.. but using punctuation like that has problems of its own.

Three spaces between these new words? It’s too bad HTML inappropriately combines multiple spaces.

Footnotes

1. was en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Index:Chinese_radical [ ↩ ]