I was originally a history major, who had a hell of a professor that taught the history of pre-modern imperial China, so I ended up focusing in that area. One

I was originally a history major, who had a hell of a professor that taught the history of pre-modern imperial China, so I ended up focusing in that area. One thing that baffled me was that characters never really fell out of usage in favor of a syllabary or alphabet the way similar ideographic systems have tended to elsewhere. Other countries in the Chinese cultural sphere, that originally imported Chinese script, developed alpha/syllabic replacements, like the Korean hangul and Japan's two kana systems. And it is not as though China was not exposed to alphabets - Buddhism, Tibet, and the various Turkic, Mongol and Manchurian tribes that bordered on (and not infrequently ruled over significant portions of China), all used variations and descendants of Semetic alphabets. It seemed like such a huge inefficiency and barrier to wide-spread literacy, to have to memorize at least a thousand or more characters, compared to 26-odd letters, 10 digits, and the 50 or so more common phonetic spelling rules, that could get you to an equivalent level of literacy in a Latin-based language. Once you've learned all the characters, and digested all the Confucian classics that make up the shared context of classic Chinese, you can be wonderfully succinct and expressive, but the learning curve to get there can be measured in decades, judging by accounts of prospective scholar-officials studying for the civil service examinations. It's perhaps the difference between becoming a proficient Vim or Emacs user, and popping open Notepad. To get back to Unicode, most of the hairiness could have been avoided if Chinese (and related regional variations) used a syllabic or alphabetic script - 100-200 characters vs ~80000 would make 2-byte wide chars sufficient to express nearly every non-dead script, with plenty of space for any number of poo or banana emoticons (if such a thing is really necessary, about which I have my doubts).