>The thing that changes if you move to a phonetics-based writing system, is that you're forced to include more context while writing. That would be a fundament

>The thing that changes if you move to a phonetics-based writing system, is that you're forced to include more context while writing. That would be a fundamental change for the language itself and I don't see why would it ever be necessary. A person who has never heard of the first two sentences you mentioned will not be able to understand the meaning until you provide a long explaination of which word is which ("more context"), or just write down the sentence itself. Which one is faster and more concise? I don't see how does "British left waffles on Falklands" involve any homophones at all. Ambiguity of homophones can be resolved via context, but that's not one-and-the-same as all "out of context" sentences. The beauty of the Chinese language is that it can be incredibly concise on paper despite having the same sentence sound like gibberish when read, which is not a problem as long as the current writing system still exists. The information density in East Asian languages are higher in general thanks to this.