[alexlur]

Thank God it didn’t happen.

[z2]

Much of the simplification adopted shorthand already in common use, which is why Japanese shinjitai simplification independently arrived at many similar characters and patterns. The second simplification round was an abysmal newspeak-esque failure, and thank goodness _that_ wasn't adopted either.

[asdasdsddd]

pinyin is the best thing that happened to the language after simplification.

Not only did it propel literacy rates to basically 100%, but it added a phonetic component to the language

[ande-mnoc]

Again, this is a very mainland-centric view. Hong Kong has never simplified their writing system or even developed a proper romanization, and yet has consistently one of the highest literacy rates in the world. Guess what helped literacy? Post-war socioeconomic development like poverty reduction, mass education and industrialization.

> it added a phonetic component to the language

Fanqie has been a thing since the 2nd century. Zhuyin was invented in 1913.

[numpad0]

Simplification is just bad. It removes too much that it breaks ability for non-speakers to infer meanings. Complexity of letter shapes is irrelevant to ease of use in computer usage, so it's just a massive loss.

[ogurechny]

“Literacy rate” is just a bureaucratic index. It was increased in most countries with mostly the same measures, no matter which their writing system was. If look closely, “literacy” meant “making mass of workers and soldiers capable of following basic instructions”, and there often was not much for them to read except for parroted propaganda (obviously, I'm not talking about China specifically, as it has been the same everywhere).

[tengwar2]

Phonetics can be counterproductive to comprehension, or converting meaning to text. Take an example much closer to English: Scottish Gaelic, which is written with the Latin alphabet. It's considerably older than English, has more distinct consonants and vowels, and it is really difficult to guess the pronounciation from a written word if you only speak English (unlike Welsh, which has nice orthography and is easier than English in that respect).

Because of these difficulties, there is a long tradition of anglicising names of settlements to meaningless collections of letters which when read by an English speaker approximate vaguely to the original Gaelic name. Unfortunately this is not a reversible process - you can't look at a modern anglicised name and guess what the Gaelic is, in general.

Now while Gaelic has a tiny population of native speakers, there are millions of people who know some "map Gaelic" - that is, we can look at a map with Gaelic place names, and understand the elements. It doesn't work for towns and villages, but generally in the north, no-one bothered to anglicise the names of natural features, just the settlements - and walking is the most popular outdoor recreation in the UK, so we learn this when we read maps.

When the first SNP government of Scotland came in, they introduced bi-lingual road signs, even in areas where Gaelic is no longer spoken. There was and is complaint over this, but I found that things became much clearer. I could look at a placename like Machrihanish, and see that it is Machaire Shanais. I still don't know what Shanais means, but Machaire is a type of landscape that I know, so I immediately know that this is low-lying and grassy, and fairly level. I can do this for thousands of place names without being able to reliably tell how to pronounce the words - similar to the way that the pronounciation of a word indicated by a Chinese character can vary widely with the part of China, so that the pronounciation becomes quite secondary to communication.

[vunderba]

Uh... no. Bopomofo which is used in Taiwan is a phonetic script that is used as a popular IME.

And simplification's only "arguable merit" is that it saves a fortune in ink at the expense of losing its historical roots. But guess what? We mostly use computers now. So great job Mao, now we have two competing standards. (Nod to XKCD).

Unrelated but to those of us who started with 繁體字, simplified just looks ugly. (龙 vs 龍)

[wolfgangbabad]

Vietnamese is relatively OK.

[alexlur]

Chữ Nôm is a borrowed writing system and not native to Vietnamese, which isn’t even a Sino-Tibetan language to begin with.

[acwan93]

Relatively. The amount of diacritics on Vietnamese surpasses European languages so text rendering becomes a challenge if a naive developer doesn't test with Vietnamese.

[publicola1990]

The Vietnamese romanized their writing, they seems to be doing fine.

[alexlur]

This isn’t factually correct. The French colonial administration romanized their writing and enforced chữ Quốc ngữ.