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> Chinese characters are not an alphabet, they do not carry phonetics, they carry meaning. And, guess what, this is arguably better. Why? Because phonetics tend to shift quickly.

But I would think (and remember reading somewhere) that phonetics shift more quickly where there is no written record of the pronunciation. Chinese has dozens of mutually unintelligible dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.). Maybe this fragmentation would be much less if they had a phonetic writing system in the first place.

> In a few decennies any spoken language has shifted, vocalisation is different, especially when the language is used by loosely coulped communities. And then you have to adapt spelling to new pronunciations. But what do you do with old books? And how do you keep the language united?

English (or Spanish, etc) is a real-world example of a mostly phonetic writing system, and I don't think it is that bad. We can still read old texts, even though our pronunciation of the words has changed vastly. If you go back far enough (e.g. to the time of Chaucer in the 1300s), it becomes hard to understand what is being said, but practically speaking I don't see this as a big problem. In contrast, I think it's very important to have a writing system that is easily learned, so that it is accessible to the entire population (not just those able to invest lots of time & effort).

> mutually unintelligible dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.)

But the trick is that when written on paper these dialects are mostly mutally intelligible.

> If you go back far enough (e.g. to the time of Chaucer in the 1300s), it becomes hard to understand what is being said

That's because at that time they still wrote phonetically. Today the spelling of some languages, like English especially, is fixed and immutable yet the pronunciation diverges.

Think about equATION and pronunciATION (or any other word ending in -ation that has "ʒ" instead of "ʃ").

There is also the reverse effect. Spelling influences pronunciation. Especially the sounds of single vowels (a,e,i,o,u), their sound being used frequently when spelling, becomes a guide to pronounce unfamiliar words, making words like "fungae" sounds nothing like what the latin word used to be (and how it was probably pronounced by english speaking educated people in the middle ages).

That said, even a crippled phonetic alphabet is certainly easier to learn than ideograms. However English is at the worst end of the spectrum. Japanese syllabic writing systems (hiragana and katakana) are much easier to write even if they have a few more glyphs. Unfortunately, even if you master -kana scripts, and thus able to write everything you want in Japanese, you'd be cut off from mainstream culture, including newspapers street signs etc

> But I would think (and remember reading somewhere) that phonetics shift more quickly where there is no written record of the pronunciation. Chinese has dozens of mutually unintelligible dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.). Maybe this fragmentation would be much less if they had a phonetic writing system in the first place.

This is why Latin, which had such an alphabet, didn't split into mutually unintelligible dialects like Romanian, Spanish, and French, right?

> We can still read old texts, even though our pronunciation of the words has changed vastly. If you go back far enough (e.g. to the time of Chaucer in the 1300s), it becomes hard to understand what is being said, but practically speaking I don't see this as a big problem.

But this wouldn't be the case if we wrote English phonetically today.

For example, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/Gawain?rgn=main;view=fulltex...) is one of my favorite pieces of Middle English literature, and exactly contemporary to Chaucer. It's hard enough to read without some knowledge of Middle English but you'd be totally lost if we wrote nait instead of knight.

>Chinese has dozens of mutually unintelligible dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.).

The different "dialects" are really different languages altogether (certainly as different as the various Romance languages, for example). It seems unlikely that a country as vast and diverse as China would have become monolingual just if they'd used a different writing system.

Chinese is an isolating language, so it doesn't have affixes, conjugation etc. so they can use that kind of writing system.

In the other hand, English and lots of other languages (including my native language Turkish) are synthetic languages, so they have affixes, and they do not adapt well to logographic writing systems (class of Chinese characters) in my opinion (I am not an expert on linguistics). My reasoning is not the cognitive overhead that's caused by memorizing tons of characters, but overhead of encoding/decoding the affixes into that type of writing system.

Japanese is an interesting example in this case, it is a synthetic language and has conjugation etc. so Japanese people use Kanji (Chinese characters as used by Japanese) to write word root and Hiragana to write conjugation, function words, spelling etc.

"My reasoning is not the cognitive overhead that's caused by memorizing tons of characters, but overhead of encoding/decoding the affixes into that type of writing system."

But that need to memorize IS a cognitive overhead that is hard to dismiss. The Japanese have to learn thousands of Kanji from their early years (of elementary school) till well into high-school! And I would say that the encoding/decoding is actually an overhead only until it gets automatized in subconscious mind.

I do not speak any language with that writing paradigm, but I can think of one big disadvantage: it's different memory efforts to learn a word's written and spoken forms.

In languages where letters are mapped to sounds, even after phonetics changed a bunch, the written and spoken forms are huge cues to each other. (There are exceptions).

If a new word came to be in English and it was written, for example, "scaramara", two fluent speakers who only saw it in writing would probably guess similar pronunciations for it, to the point that one would understand the other's speech. I suppose something like that could not happen in Chinese. Is this assumption correct?

> it's different memory efforts to learn a word's written and spoken forms

I've always felt that I need to memorize both the written and spoken forms, when I study English.

I have learnt Chinese and use it for work. Chinese characters have a personality of their own, you don't need to know the sound to remember them. You could even read perfectly Chinese and being unable to communicate orally. This very hard to understand or even believe when not experienced for real.

So yes, learning Chinese or Kanji has a steeper learning curve, but no, it is not that hard, and in fact from context and shape you can guess a possible pronunciation and meaning for unknown characters, sometime.

I've heard that Mandarin is the only language many people regret having learned.