4 ms·

> I doubt it would be very long until Mandarin developed into the dominant language. I kinda doubt that, given its writing system.

• jazzyjackson 5y ago
  There have been various movements that have advocated for the use of pinyin as a primary writing system, for the same reason that Beijing replaced Traditional script with Simplified.
  • tablespoon 5y ago
    > There have been various movements that have advocated for the use of pinyin as a primary writing system, for the same reason that Beijing replaced Traditional script with Simplified. I don't speak or read Chinese, but my understanding is there are a lot of homophones (and a culture of homophonic puns) that would make that undesirable (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophonic_puns_in_Standard_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophonic_puns_in_Standard_Ch...).
    • jazzyjackson 5y ago
      There are lots of homonyms but they are disambiguated by context. Look at it this way: you don’t need the characters when you’re listening to someone speak, so why wouldn’t you be able to sound out the phrase from pinyin and understand its meaning?
      • tablespoon 5y ago
        > There are lots of homonyms but they are disambiguated by context. But wouldn't that lose something? My understanding is a lot of the puns specifically rely on the characters to force a different reading than the context would imply (or to evade censorship by having many ways to write the same sounds).