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Given that the Chinese writing system has retained its large number of complex-to-draw characters for thousands of years, I think it's a bit of a stretch to con
by pm215 5y ago
Given that the Chinese writing system has retained its large number of complex-to-draw characters for thousands of years, I think it's a bit of a stretch to consider that an alphabet is "far too efficient to ignore". Historically AIUI the alphabet is a comparatively rare invention -- more writing systems borrowed the concept from somewhere else than developed it from scratch.
- IIAOPSW 5y agoI'm sure when you break down written Chinese into all the basic shapes and modifying radicals, you will find a number of segments that is very close to the number of bits needed to encode a single character. Written Chinese looks very complex because it codes far more than 7 bits per glyph. But that doesn't mean it is wastefully encoding. I add the caveat that traditional vs simplified Chinese suggests I might be wrong on this specific example, and that institutional stability and standardization froze Chinese writing in place before it naturally evolved to a simpler state.
- Grustaf 5y agoMost Chinese characters consist of a radical (out of 200 or so) and a sound part. So it's not like Hangul or some other systems where you can definitely break them up into many smaller parts. It's true that visually speaking, some sound parts consist of for example boxes or lines that are also used in other characters, but they have no independent sound, or even deeper meaning.