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Comment by gcr | Hacker News Reader

All of your arguments apply to English too.

A Chinese reader could wonder why we use multiple glyphs to expose a single concept. "How inefficient," they might think, "each character has so few bits of information! Are speakers of this language just memorizing entire blocks of characters at a time so they can read fast?"

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One advantage of Latin characters (shared by Cyrillic, Greek, and even Arabic) is that the featural elements of glyphs are few enough that you can make each individual glyph small. You can clearly read Latin text even at 6-8pt font sizes, whereas the need to distinguish multiple parallel lines in Chinese characters makes it barely legible at a standard 12pt font.

This may be true in general, but extensive use of diacritics, e.g. as in ancient Greek or Vietnamese, could make reading small type extremely difficult.

"standard 12pt font" is biased for latin characters, though - at the larger font size, the Chinese characters are still getting much better information compression than the latin characters, which need to expand horizontally by using several characters per unit of meaning, plus separators (spacing and hyphens) to even be readable. In practice, even adjusting for font size, paragraphs of Chinese and Japanese are almost always shorter than latin-language equivalents.

Of course, the real winner of this argument is probably Korean.

Actually, I think Korean is not a winner. Its block-shape dictates that a character like 이 take the same amount of space as 핥, so there's a limit on how small a character goes. (There are fonts that try to break out of the standard square shape, but I don't think any found wide use.)

I think proportional fonts have a better space utilization by their nature. Anyways, I don't think that's an important metric. It's not like we live in an age where paper is scarce.

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