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

Quadibloc wrote:

So there is a minor difficulty
resulting from the nature of the Chinese spoken language - tones are
important, but there is no comfortable way to note them.

AFAIK Vietnamese (tiếng Việt) has tones and is written in Latin alphabet
plus a lot of diacritics.

And if you take a closer look to European languages like English,
German, or Italian, which have a strong spelling standard, and only use
few diacritics, the pronounciation is not unique.

If I restrict the view to Standard German, there will be more or less
large regional (or social) differences in spoken Language.

And if we look at German dialects, some of them do not have a spelling
standard - e.g. Bavarian.

It seems to depend on tradition and identity, if the population of a
dialect wants to maintain a different writing standard. AFAIK the very
small population of Romansh (Total speakers 50,000–70,000 in
Switzerland) have different spelling systems for their 4 - 6 dialects.

Helmut Wollmersdorfer
.

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