My query tangents on the post below about the various spellings of Osama.
Why didn’t western languages adopt a character system like the Chinese? Mandarin, Cantonese and other dialects are different enough to be their own languages except those speakers can all read, considering they are literate, Chinese characters and understand them without any confusion. Folks would have their national identity through their spoken languages but written communication would be easier since everyone could read it and there would be fewer misunderstandings. Why do western languages hang onto the roman alphabet for various spellings and different pronunciations (English being one of the odder ones considering one of the other posts below this one)?
It would be impossible to set up an ideographic writing system that would represent more than one language. Effectively the writing system would have to be a language unto itself, no more related to any spoken language than is American Sign Language. Another problem is that the common written language would immediately begin to diverge into its English, French, etc., flavours from the moment it was established.
Any two languages have structural differences, not just lexical. For your system to work you would have to be able to map each English word to a character which could then be mapped to a French word. But an English sentence, translated word-for-word, whether directly or through your ideographs, does not make a French sentence.
The idea of having a singe shared second language, through which all translation could be carried out, is an old one, and candidates include Esperanto, Eurolang and Volapük.
By the way, Chinese writing is not really ideographic; about half of the information in the character relates to sound.
Also there are several different versions of written Chinese. Both long form and simplified. You’ve got to actually do some study to understand both versions. Not impossible, but show a Taiwanese mainland writing, and they will not understand it.
Written forms of Chinese between the Mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the overseas Chinese are not necessarily mutually understandable. There are characters that exist in Cantonese that don’t exist elsewhere (cantonese “mo” or the character for “not have”, which is “mei you” in Mandarin).
In case you didn’t know, Chinese characters were invented to be written on bamboo slats. Now we write them with computers. Wierd, huh?
Thank you! Why don’t more people get this? In fact, the vast majority of Chinese characters relate primarily to sound. Only 3% (according to John DeFrancis - http://www.wenlin.com/jdf.htm) are purely “ideograms”. Native readers learn and see virtually the whole lot purely in terms of sounds. Chinese characters form a syllabary - no more. Attempts to simplify it (as China Guy mentions) have not helped - the “simpler” characters often lack etymological content and symmetry, and are therefore less recognizable. It’s a disaster of a writing system. It makes English look halfway sensible.
Also, European languages are inflected languages, ie word endings change depending on the case, gender, number, whatever. A character based writing system is not well suited for such language. Look at the Japanese for an example. IIRC, initially they borrowed the Chinese characters for their writings, but apparently that does not exactly work very well with their inflected language. So, they ended up devising their own Hiragana and Katagana, which are somewhat similar to our alphabet, but not exactly, to conjugate verbs and to represent some other part of speech, while retaining the Chinese Kanji characters for many nouns and proper names.