[nsonnad]

Hello, I'm the author of this piece. It's a very good question, and the answer may simply be that script systems are inferior, but anecdotally I would say there are two advantages:

First, it makes the etymology of the script is very apparent. Often etymology in for example English is very obscure, and requires great leaps of imagination and inference to make the connections. Compare that to the character 灣 referred to in the piece, which means "bay" and contains the "water radical." The etymology can be made more clear in this way.

Second, the script is agnostic to how the characters are pronounced. This is what has allowed it to be used for several languages in China (often inaccurately referred to as "dialects")—which are often pronounced completely differently—for hundreds of years.

That said, there are clearly many, many disadvantages, and the main thing preventing change may simply be inertia.

[taejo]

The "etymology" you speak of (and is often used in a Chinese context) has nothing to do with actual etymology. The origin of characters is barely related at all to the origins of words.

The word 灣 wān (= bay, cove) might be related to 彎 wān (= curve, bend) but the character doesn't tell us that; it's certainly not related to 水 shuǐ (= water) which appears in 灣 as 氵.

灣 wān also provides an excellent example of where the "character etymology" definitely isn't the actual origin of the word. 臺灣 Táiwān (= Taiwan) is made of characters meaning "terrace" and "cove", so you might think aha, Taiwan has a purely Chinese etymology from "Terrace Cove", but in fact it's unrelated: it's from Siraya (an indigenous Taiwanese language) Tay-uan (= sea people).

[azernik]

It can also, as my Japanese textbook pointed out, be faster to read if you're familiar with the characters in a body of text. Like the difference between reading "one hundred forty-three" vs "143". It's the input that kills you.

But I think computer/smartphone semi-phonetic input kind of gets you the best of both worlds.

[Nitramp]

Experienced readers of alphabetic languages recognise words by pattern matching their shape. That is, you do not individually decipher the characters that make up a word, but you pattern match on (mostly) the ascenders and descenders, and then maybe sanity check first and last characters.

That greatly speeds up reading, but also makes it hard to discover typos, in particular characters inside of words that have no as-/descenders.

In this way, alphabetic writing is maybe more accessible - novice readers can decipher character by character and map to phonemes, thus having a way to understand all words; experts pattern match and read faster.

[gozur88]

I'm skeptical of the "quick to read" argument. An educated Chinese speaker generally knows something in the neighborhood of 5,000 characters ("full literacy" is supposed to be 3k-4k), which is far less than readers of phonetic systems (20k-35k). Unless you're a professional writer of some variety you're going to spend more time looking up words in Chinese.

[Xophmeister]

> and the main thing preventing change may simply be inertia.

And pride. I've noticed the Chinese are quick to defend their writing system, despite its lack of "efficiency". Which is understandable: it is a thing of great beauty, with thousands of years of cultural heritage.

[swang]

Which "Chinese"? Your point seems to miss where the pride lays.

There is a lot infighting since the Communist in the 50s/60s decided to create simplified Chinese. Traditionalists would argue that simplified Chinese writing is not as elegant/pretty as traditional (I agree, although I have a bias as I grew up in a country that kept traditional Chinese) but the dominance of China has forced almost every other place in the world that writes in Chinese to use simplified. This includes Japan, which I believe a large majority of their signs are written in simplified version of kanji.

And this spills over into the U.S. where the Chinese who have lived here (which would consist mostly of Hong Kong and Taiwanese) are now fighting (or have fought) the recently immigrated Chinese from China over which system to use in U.S. schools.

So there is a lot of pride, but maybe not in the way you believe.

[mazerackham]

Lol, I wouldn't call it out as pride. There might simply be no reason to change. Ideas have been expressed in the written language for thousands of years, and I believe that it's probably as efficient as English. Very different, but similar levels of efficiency. Would it be "pride" if Chinese people questioned why English was full of inconsistencies and why don't they just change those aspects of the language?

At the same time, English is a required subject in Chinese, and hopefully as that improves, people here will get the pros (and cons) of both systems.