Well, someone has finally gotten totally fed up with English spelling.
Mark Rosenfelder proposes a system of English characters that would function in the same way that Chinese characters do for the Chinese. After trying to explain “The tough coughs as he ploughs through the dough thoroughly” to a non-native English speaker one time too many, I think it might be useful, at least as art material.
Communication would become one giant game of Pictionary.
“You wanted to meet me where? The school? That doesn’t look like a school! A school has a bell on it, everyone knows that! That definitely looks more like a house. Doesn’t that look like a house, Bob? Crimeny, that’s why our team always loses…”
“The Bird was Happy when the Dog ate the Politician.”
(See Dave Barry Does Japan)
What a delightful, but horribly impractical idea - I think the wide range of accents abroad in the English language would nobble the idea.
Take the word boat for example - in some parts of England, it’s pronounced something like bowat or boowat - in other parts, it’s boot and in others, something approaching bot - and that’s all within the borders of England. Throw in Scots, Welsh, Australian, Kiwi, South African and a variety of American accents, and we simply wouldn’t be able to understand each other in written form.
Wouldn’t yingzi get around the whole question of dialect differences though? That’s what hanzi do for the Chinese. Most of the dialect differences are in the volwels, aren’t they?
I can see what you’re saying, but I don’t think it would - it would just render some written English incomprehensible.
It’s an extraordinarily stupid idea, if it’s meant seriously rather than just as a joke. Chinese characters fit Chinese fairly well, but even they now start teaching reading and writing with pinyin, i.e., the Latin alphabet. But they don’t work so well with unrelated languages.
The idea of having to learn all these combinations boggles the mind:
Before I got to “curse”, I’d thought “verse”.
Vientnamese and Korean used to be written with Chinese characters, but they both made a very sensible decison to move to a phonetic script: the Latin alphabet for Vietnamese, and the locally developed hangul for Korean. Why would English ever want to go the other way?
If Webster and Dewey (a.k.a. Dui) and Esperanto haven’t done much to change everyday usage, I doubt this dude’s heiroglyphs will.
Heh. As a conlanger I’ve known about Mr. Rosenburg for years. It’s not a serious proposal - it’s mostly to illustrate how Chinese works (and that page has been up at least five years). Personally I think his best page is ‘Are You American?’
(The ‘test’ itself is here and it also links to ‘tests’ for other cultures)
And his best page about English is Hou tu pranownse Inglish
Thread OVER! < stock applause footage >
For bonus points, create ideograms expressing the concepts “Crimeny” and “Bob.”
So if we switch to pictograms, how do you alphabetize?
That’s a nontrivial question. It’s one reason why Chinese culture was so static for so long and why it was dominated by bureaucrats. If you were the only person who knew how important contracts were filed, then not only do you have job security, but your successor would have to be someone you picked and trained. What if you were sick for a few days? How would anyone find documents?
And, of course, English is always spelled the way it was pronounced – at the time the word entered the language. Originally, all the -ough words in "“The tough coughs as he ploughs through the dough thoroughly” were pronounced exactly the same*. It’s not the fault of spelling that people started using new pronunciations.
And if you change spellings due to new pronunciations, the next question is “Who’s?” If I say to-MAY-toe and you say ta-MAH-toe, who is right? Should we have two (or more) spellings of one word? Would a document written in the deep South be hard to understand by someone from New York City? How is that an advantage?
*Roughly “oo” where the represents the velar fricative (like the German “ach”), a sound the language has dropped.
Thanks to the OP for mentionning this site. I liked it a lot but had lost the link and forgotten its name. 
LOL thanks, Doug
Come to think of it, it would be fun to have a language made entirely of stock footage. Kind of like Hawking-speak but messier. People would get lazy and just “speak” in famous movie quotes. [click here for “Oh, behave!”]