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Comment by brilliantcode | Hacker News Reader

One crazy idea I had to make Chinese less complex is to use the Korean alphabet while retaining some common Chinese characters that the Korean alphabet cannot reproduce in terms of sound. You could even use accents to indicate the specific tone.

我是韩国人。- wo shi hangguo ren can easily and concisely be written using Korean alphabet phonetically.

The two are a perfect match. One system to easily construct sounds and the other carrying deep compressed semantics with the minimal sound syntax.

It would be like like what Vietnamese language did using roman alphabets and accents.

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Language and writing systems are not just tools of utility. They bear cultural and historical significance too. Just because the Chinese writing system has a steeper learning curve does not necessarily mean it is bad. It is remarkable that a hieroglyphical system survived on a globe dominated by alphabetical language systems.

> How can China expect the rest of the world to use Chinese when even they themselves don't know it 100%?

And there goes Shakespeare. On average there's 15,000 words per play. I bet most readers do not have the education to know every single word in that 15,000.

"The Second Edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries." [1]

[1]: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/how-many-words-are...

> And there goes Shakespeare. On average there's 15,000 words per play. I bet most readers do not have the education to know every single word in that 15,000.

In English (as I assume in Chinese) you can usually figure out what is being said in Shakespeare even if you don't know the exact definition of the word. You also can usually pronounce it correctly (at least for the modern pronunciation).

Absolutely. Chinese too. There are patterns among words. Also if you know part of the phrase not hard to figure out either. Once you know the language you will whether it is Chinese or Korean.

The story of Chinese Character reform is a lot like the story of HTML standards. The CCP once had a vision of successively simplifying script reform to a more phonetic system. Their first round of simplifications made official many vernacular simplifications already in use. But when they proposed their second round, hardly anyone was enthusiastic to use it—hence it was scrapped.

Second simplification characters are pretty cool. Every once in a while you'll see them on handwritten signs.

Any chance of a link to some examples of second simplification characters?

There are quite a few on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chi...). I would say the most commonly seen are 仃 for 停 (stop, park a car), 桔 for 橘 (orange), and less commonly 歺 for 餐 (meal).

These are pretty vernacular writing now: you only see 仃 painted on walls near alleys where they tell you to park or not to park a car somewhere and 歺 is found around some small canteens. 桔 is a bit more popular than the other two among schoolkids.

IIRC Korean alphabet doesn't distinguish tonality of vowels, so you can't actually use it at all. If you want spelling reform, bless the canonical latin spelling with tonal markings as the new way to spell Chinese and be done with it. It's as much of a departure from the current system as any other phonetic system you come up with and you can enter it on most PCs already, no need to add to the Unicode standard, no need for new keyboards, etc.

I'm saying a modified Korean alphabet to distinguish tonality of vowels with the pinyin four sounds.

Chinese (especially Mandarin) already has a number of ways to write phonetically: with homophones and systems like Bopomofo and Pinyin. There's no lack of options and no need to introduce yet another one.

It reminds me of some of the past movements to reform English spelling rules. Taking things a step further, why not just replace every extant writing system with IPA? Sounds like fun. Surely nothing could go wrong.

Spanish already matches IPA, surprinsingly.

Not for c, ch, h, j, ll, ñ, or y, among other possibilities. :-)

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