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>The inflexibility of the Chinese script has always reinforced the inflexibility of the Chinese state. The democratization of Taiwan and Hong Kong must be pret

• Noseshine 10y ago
  "reinforced", not "caused".
  • dibujante 10y ago
    "Movable goalposts", not "fixed goalposts".
• echaozh 10y ago
  > They do not accept a canon of unchanging characters handed down from antiquity. They want to make up new ones and use Roman letters I've never heard such claims. Why do we need to make up new characters when there are more strange characters than necessary? Even the youngest can enjoy the so called Martian language[1] (the Chinese version of the leetspeak) with valid Chinese characters. And you can actually make up new characters by writing components as individual characters, and the outcome is just a larger and funnier character. As for wishing for a Roman alphabet... I think it's more of a fancy of those already using such an alphabet. If you grow up seeing Chinese characters everywhere but Roman letters not so often if ever, the characters will be a habit. Also, pinyin may not be very easy for many parts of the country, as the inhabitants will have difficulty in making the precise pronunciation. Their words can be easily understood, but it will be a hard time for them to pin down the correct pinyin. To input characters, the input method is very forgiving, allowing missing or redundant g's in ng or h's in sh, ch and zh. Some people even need to guess between r and l, h and f. Characters are a much better, semantic way of communication.