Re: intrinsic advantage of Latin alphabet over bopomofo (for Chinese)??

In article <esbkop$bvc$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Peacenik <cnelsonpublic@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"L" <yuwuyan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:es5bud$phd$1@xxxxxxxxxxx
Is there any intrinsic advantage of Latin alphabet over bopomofo
(for Chinese)?

None, other than being more easily read and typed by most Westerners.

AFAIK, Chinese has not been "satisfactorily" set up as
an alphabetic language. There are several advantages of
a language with a reasonable size alphabet, ease of reading
and typing being very important. Also, it makes dictionary'
searches much easier. BTW, spaces and punctuation have to
be considered part of the alphabet.

I do not know if much larger alphabets than the Latin one
have been successfully placed on typewriters. If one is to
include numerals and upper and lower cases, as well as
punctuation, one already has 69 characters already, and the
total number of characters, counting shifts, is about 90 on
computer keyboards. These are slightly larger than
standard typewriter keyboards, and the additional
characters are not that easily handled by touch typing, and
indeed are not always in the same place.

Various modifications can be made, such as requiring
multiple keys for a character, such as accents and umlauts
on European keyboards. But the alphabet should be small
enough to handle and remember, and large enough to be
efficient; we could use the binary ASCII representation
of each character.


--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
hrubin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558
.

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