Re: pinyin in daily life Re: What's The Hardest Language To Learn?

Living in China, you might note that you virtually never see pinyin in
publications or signs anywhere. The rare exceptions are as
transliterations (for book titles, storefront signage, road signs) but
among these you virtually never see thé tǒnè mārks, meaning they're
not functioning in any way to clarify a certain word, but rather just
transliterations.

No one "reads" in pinyin. Theres no such thing as an article or paper
written in pinyin. The only place you'll see it is in a dictionary,
when someone's IME breaks, or when someone uses a really rare
character or a character with more than one pronunciation where it's
ambiguous (very rare).

I like to make the analogy here between chinese characters and chinese
politics. In the West, no one really debates or questions the notion
that "China is a backwards dictatorship that will inevitably cave in
to democracy" or even "China is rapidly westernizing." Ask any of the
1.3 billion Chinese and you'll find very few agree with those
statements; China's approach to governing and statescraft follows a
completely unique historical narrative than the west, and the concept
Chinese identity is not so much a "sovereign nation" as a
"civilization." So it's a whole different approach.

Likewise, with chinese writing, there's a degree to which I seem to
hear sentiments like "Chinese characters are a backwards system that
will inevitably cave in to alphabets" or even "There is a movement to
replace Chinese characters with an alphabet." In this case, I'd argue
the claims are patently false. There's a need for Hanyu Pinyin in
China for the same reason there's an IPA; for definitive lexicography.
In China this is certainly pronounced since Mandarin Chinese is being
pushed as a national language to unite the hundreds of dialects and
languages that exist there.

But in fact, there's no effort to phase out characters, because
reading doesn't require alphabets. In fact, chinese characters are
more efficient to read than alphabetic languages, because it
capitalizes on the idea of shape recognition, which reading is.
Furthermore, the structure of chinese characters with 'radical'
components comes with rich connotations and memory aid that an
alphabet could never capture. Thoughts are formed by symbols, and
unlike alphabetic languages, Chinese cuts to the chase.

my $0.02

P.S. I think Shavian is an awesome idea; it's just a matter of me
making the plunge and learning to read fast in it-- gotta relearn all
that shape recognition!
.

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