Oh no, don't get me wrong --- I agree: Chinese characters are hard. People can't read them. An alphabet would be much easier. On the other hand, Mair seems to

Oh no, don't get me wrong --- I agree: Chinese characters are hard. People can't read them. An alphabet would be much easier. On the other hand, Mair seems to think that slaughtering your native lexicon and replacing it with a bunch of English/Russian loanwords would be a good thing, while I disagree. (This has been the exact consequence of alphabetisation in Dungan and Korean). And I also think that devoting a career to trying to get China to switch to the Roman alphabet is an irrational waste of brainpower --- it's never going to happen, for reasons totally unrelated to efficiency or practicality. But these are little quibbles compared to the real issue: even if China threw out Chinese characters tomorrow, all the historical linguists like Mair would STILL be mad, cuz the damage has already been done: we may never have any clear idea of the pronunciations of so many old languages from civilisations in China's orbit. In the rare event those civilisations' literate elites wanted to write in their own languages (instead of writing in classical Chinese), they had to use Chinese characters to try to approximate the sounds, because they never developed their own alphabets --- and their approximations sucked. In the mean time, the Indologists point and laugh cuz they can tell you exactly how Sanskrit sounded all those thousands of years ago.