Comments by "Alan Friesen" (@alanfriesen9837) on "Chinese is NOT picture writing! - History of Writing Systems #5 (Determinatives)" video.

  1. Creative-Name, as a white American of exclusively northern European stock I believe that the Chinese system is a better written system than Latin and the reason why is that learning to read Chinese does not require that you learn to speak Chinese. In the west nobody thinks of learning to read another language without learning to speak it because in an alphabetic language there's no way to do this. But in China there are, and for millennia have been, many distinct spoken languages (undersold as dialects), whose literate managerial classes could understand each other. This probably plays a large part in China's long history as a successful civilization-state. And while it maybe more difficult to learn another writing system, I don't think it's more difficult than learning another spoken language.
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  2. Written Chinese has been simplified and consolidated twice, once under the Shihuangdi in the third century BC and once under Mao Zedong in the twentieth century AD. Both of these events have improved the power and utility of the script by broadening literacy within the state and tying the different languages together into a common single script. From a political standpoint the Chinese written language has been a much better tool for imperial cohesion than an alphabetic language would have been.
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  3. You could definitely have a simplified Chinese keyboard. There are 32 strokes which could each be given a key. Strokes could be keyed out in stroke order and once all of the character's strokes are pressed a separate key that tells the writing program that the word is finished could be depressed at which point the writing program looks up which character has that stroke order and replaces the line of individual strokes with the appropriate character. Today's writing programs certainly have enough computing power to make that seemless and simplified Chinese could be written in this was as quickly as English on a QWERTY board (and printed documents would require a lot less paper). The question is, is it worth investing in something like that when all keyboards may soon be obsolete?
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  4. "Nowadays, of course, imperialism has been replaced by mercantilism, and the global language of mercantilism is English." That is the case now (hence your use of the term 'Nowadays') But that has little to do with any superior traits of the English language and everything to do with the last two centuries being dominated by English speaking global superpowers. Chinese imperialism is every bit as impressive as British imperialism. It's older, its global population percentages are comparable and it's far more lasting. Where it falls short in comparison is in it's geographical reach, but unlike British imperialism the final chapter of Chinese imperialism has yet to be written so that may or may not be the case going forward. I disagree that English is, "…ideally situated to become the world's lingua franca." It's a difficult language to speak and as an alphabetic language you can't communicate in English without learning how to speak it. Mandarin Chinese is probably more difficult to learn to speak but you don't have to learn to speak it in order to communicate through it. Because of this subject peoples are able to maintain their mother tongues and still function effectively within the empire. As for a spoken imperial language, something with less deviances in its rule set like German or Spanish or just anything with less French influence would probably prove to be a better fit.
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  5. I think if we wanted to design a really good lingua franca with today's conditions in mind I'd suggest Castilian Spanish as the spoken component and Simplified Chinese as the written component.
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