Some linguists (mostly Western) have advocated transitioning to a mixed system of characters and pinyin. I don't think that will ever happen because an uglier a

Some linguists (mostly Western) have advocated transitioning to a mixed system of characters and pinyin. I don't think that will ever happen because an uglier and less harmonious writing system could not possibly be devised. Chinese would be much better off with something syllabic and square, like Hangul. With some amount of fiddling I think it could be made to work for most of the different Chinese languages and potentially even elucidate cognates between them, retaining one of the main benefits of characters.