A language where a spoken word has completely different meanings depending on how hoarse you are that day can be a lot of things, but "simple" is not one of the

A language where a spoken word has completely different meanings depending on how hoarse you are that day can be a lot of things, but "simple" is not one of them, imho. The author doesn't understand that most european words aren't just made up on the spot for new things, they are built with the same process as he describes for chinese: pick an existing term and adapt it for a new use, or pick several terms and join them up. Of course, you probably have to go back a few hundreds or thousands of years to get at the root of the thing. otoh, I could say that the advantage of having a small non-meaningful alphabet is that you're not stuck with the symbolism of existing characters, so you're free to actually make words up if you want to. The advantage of having a (for the most part) neutral tonal system in european languages combined with a small neutral system of characters, combined with the rich heritage of the small number of base languages that created all these languages (latin, greek, etc) and the freedom to synthesize words whenever appropriate is what is making english the lingua franca that it is, and what keeps all other (let's not say euro, but western) languages up there on the importance chart. I wonder if it would be easy for chinese speakers to understand how western languages work if we say that each character in the latin alphabet is the equivalent of a single stroke in chinese...