Comment Re:Not necessarily popular with the Chinese, eithe (Score 1) 535
If you look at the wiki URL I cited, you'll immediately notice the problem. Chinese language IS a very terse and highly economical language with many symbols, sounds, and tones. In speech, people *disambiguate* words by pairing the words with "word-complements" (I don't know what they're called) to achieve the intended meaning. HOWEVER, the pairings are limited to daily use. Even then, there are still ambiguities. Take, for example, the word "shishi" in Pinyin. You get 23 matches. Even if you add tones, you STILL have ambiguities. If you look at the word list, they're not rare, right? If I say (in Pinyin) "shi4shi4 nan2 liao4", what does it mean? Is it "affairs of the world are hard to guess"? Or "everything is hard to guess"? Or "the state of the affair is hard to guess"? Or "affair of this world is hard to abandon"? In this situation, people disambiguate even further by putting in more "word-complements". Note that the phrase is a common complaint! It is so context specific.
Also, languages are NOT limited to spoken language. How about poems? Stories? Formalities? Jokes? Puns? If the words are written, especially in poems or terse narrative, they can be paired in almost every way and can create a very very powerful poem or narrative. Or puns! Oh man! There are so many puns based on this very fact.
Now, can you say that Chinese character is dispensable again?