> It seems like characters would give the meaning but not the voice. You'd be surprised. It's easy enough for a writer to distinguish dialog spoken by a count

> It seems like characters would give the meaning but not the voice. You'd be surprised. It's easy enough for a writer to distinguish dialog spoken by a country bumpkin vs a sophisticated urbanite or between a ruler and a peasant because they have a different set of vocab and there are Chinese characters for most of the vocab that the different speakers will use.