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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

> I feel that this writing system is best used to facilitate inter-cultural communication

This happens in China

When I used to spend time with a Mandarin speaker, he explained to me that written Chinese is the same throughout the country, but the dialects are often so different that they can't understand each other.

It would be as if all romance languages were written the same way, so that written Italian, Spanish, French, ect, were the same.

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I'm a native Spanish speaker. I can understand written French, Portuguese and Italian with a little effort. Speech is a different story. Italian is the closest phonetically.

This is exactly how Arabic works today. It's a huge impediment, not a benefit.

Can you please elaborate on why it’s an impediment?

Because this way no-one has written forms of their mother tongue. They have to learn a second language and its written form. As others are pointing out, the situation is pretty much equivalent to Europe 1000 years ago when Latin had evolved into separate languages but all writing was still done in Latin. What would you prefer: being able to speak and write in French or speak in French but have to learn Latin to be able to write?

For much of European history, Latin acted as a common written language, and Italian, Spanish, French were vulgar Latin with different influences (this is probably a simplification)

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