The problem with your argument is that, while what politicians do is irrelevant to *science*, coming up with a solution to the physical problem is part of a *political* process, where we can of course discuss whether Al Gore, JP Morgan & Co, etc are working in the our (the unprivileged) interests.

For example, to take things to an extreme as an illustration, science tells us that if we kill everyone on Earth, the warming will be stopped. Shall we do that? Going down the ever slippery slope, we could ask what if the solution entails millions of people suffering more than they already do? What if under developed countries somehow bear an unfair burden of the problem? What if rich people receive unjust benefits from exploiting the "carbon offset" markets, at the expense of the sufferings of others? What if these political interests obscure and cast the supposedly objective *science* in doubt? What if people who don't have a PhD refuse to believe that more suffering *now* and making fat bastards rich is not a cost they would rather bear to avoid a supposed catastrophe that may happen in 50 years?

It's not just science. The physics is the easy part.

Oh, I finally got what he meant.... thanks.

Yeah right. I'll come back to see whether it's half finished in twenty years.

For traditional => simplified, it's a matter of adjusting a few days and thinking wtf why does it have to look so ugly, but it's still trivial. I never really spent time "learning" the simplified characters beyond trying to read a few novels in simplified Chinese. The difficulty is probably about the same as adjusting to read 1337 5p34k.

Not sure about the other way round. Might be harder, but I can't imagine it's as hard as learning another language or dialect...

What I really meant though, was that regardless of whether the two writing forms are mutually intelligible, they are still a basis where different spoken dialects can share a common written script. In contrast, a pronunciation based writing system would cause the written forms to diverge with each dialect having its own text.

You probably already know what I mean though, even if I might not be expressing myself clearly...

Indeed it's like trying to define the boundaries of (biology) species and variety. But still, in some cases the differences between Chinese dialects can arguably be greater than some of those within the European "languages".

To illustrate the differences between so called "dialects", "why" is "wei shen me" [1] in Mandarin, but "dim gai" in Cantonese; "who" is "shei" in Mandarin, but "bin gor" in Cantonese. Negatives ("no-something") usually takes a prefix of "bu" in Mandarin but "mm" in Cantonese. Their written forms are totally different too, so it's not like we have a very funny way to pronounce the same thing. I'd say it is the "basic language" that is different, while the large corpus of vocabulary is mostly shared among the "dialects". But then, vocabulary is liberally borrowed between the European languages too.

There's a few things that obscures the wide variation between the "dialects". One is that we write written Chinese in mostly the same way, due to tradition and communicative purposes. Standard modern Chinese is written in the form of modern Mandarin (i.e. Putonghua) and the norm is that "self-respecting" educated Chinese write in that standard form regardless of their spoken dialect. The second is that while our pronunciations are can be markedly different, a large part of the written script remains identical, because Chinese characters are not pronunciation based. So while there may be variations in the script in different European languages (eg. "wine" (en) => "vin" (fr) => "wein" (de)), the written text is the same in Chinese, even though there may be large pronunciation differences.

A fun thing that I like to mention is how written Japanese might in some cases be more legible to Mandarin speakers than written Cantonese. The Kanji in written Japanese has roots in classical Chinese (something comparable to Latin in Europe), and thus if the Japanese text is mostly written in Kanji (i.e. avoiding kana where possible), it's quite legible to those who understand Chinese. For example, the Kanji form of "who" in Japanese ("da-re") is written in the same character as "shei" in Mandarin. Of course, when spoken it is totally mutually illegible, but you can see how a supposedly "different" language (Chinese vs Japanese) can have more similar roots than a "dialect" within the Chinese language family.

[1] ("me" pronounced as in "mermaid" without the suffix)

Flattered with your title (it's my first spoken language), but you really have no idea what you're talking about.

There are various "accents" of Mandarin, but Cantonese, Hokkien, etc are not accents. I'd say they're somewhere between dialects and distinct languages. Even discounting phonetic differences, the written vocabulary can be very different -- to the extent that I probably understand written Japanese more than the colloquial use of various Chinese "dialects". (To a Mandarin speaker, I often hypothesize that Cantonese written in Chinese characters can be harder to understand than Japanese-written-in-mostly-kanji... it's a fun fact that shows the divergence of the local dialects/languages)

Not sure whether anyone thinks that people speaking Hokkien "suck" (I haven't heard of any such "dialect-discrimination", though the official discouragement [or even persecution] of local spoken dialects is surely happening), but it's a practical problem for communication if there's no common legible language for people within a country.

I'm the opposite. I generally seem to read English at a much faster rate, even though Chinese is supposed to be my "first language". It might have something to do with "practice". The amount of English I read is probably an order of magnitude greater than Chinese.

It also might have something to do with the content though. It feels like Chinese fiction is easier on my eyes, whereas English is better for technical and (complex) argumentative writing.

Not true. Chinese is my first language, and since I'm not Taiwanese, I still have no friggin idea how to pronounce those Zhuyin symbols. They are not actual Chinese words (characters).

Pedantic.

But I think the GP's claim is still valid. Using pronunciation based writing systems for writing Chinese would isolate the various spoken dialects because the pronunciation between them are not quite legible to each other, but either simplified or traditional Chinese works as a common, mutually intelligible form.

Chinese has a long tradition of writing differently than speaking.

It was quite recent (early 20th century) where there were movement by Chinese intellectuals to "write what you speak" (which was largely successful) -- but the tradition still sort of lives on where the spoken language seems to change faster than the written language, and the form is still slightly different. The spoken language is sometimes a bit more wordy than the written language too, perhaps in part because of the need to disambiguate the homophones.

Besides, it would be impossible to easily read any Chinese texts written more than a hundred years ago if you just knew the romanized pronunciations. The issue with *writing* them is sort of becoming a moot point, with the advent of computers. The standard way to type Chinese is using pronunciation based input methods.

The Neanderthals were there first. I, for one...

Half of your post in #44780265 is wrong, and basically all of your post in #44780073 is wrong, except the parts where you start making your own opinions based on the wrong information. Is it not fair for people to point that out? If I made a post that was half full of misinformation, I would expect to be called out for that.

Perhaps you would like to think that although all your premises (the most insignificant thing!) are wrong, your conclusions (the important part, yea?) are still correct. But if that is so, why bother to attempt to make an reasoned argument in the first place? Just click the "Post Anonymously" button and flame away!

They apparently didn't only differentiate on hardware alone:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/04/16/170233/samsung-accused-of-paying-for-negative-htc-reviews

Objective C is actually a great language. It combines the speed of C with the dynamism of the Objective C runtime, and you can mix C++ into it if you want. That gives you a *lot* of options, when you need to balance performance vs type safety vs speed of development, etc.

The foundation libraries may be a bit wordy for some people's tastes, but the language itself is quite solid.

If you meant to talk about the downsides of Xcode, well, that's totally another story...

Succinct proof.