Quote Originally Posted by Marcus View Post
The symbol "7" or"$" does not give you any clue to pronunciation, does it bother you?
No, but if I had to memorize 3,000+ different symbols in order to be sufficiently literate to read a daily newspaper, it might bother me a bit! Remember, Marcus, I'm certainly not saying that English spelling is logical or easy; I'm just saying that in general, alphabetic writing systems are easier to learn than a character-based system like Chinese or Japanese, because alphabets reduce the total number of different symbols that one must memorize.

Quote Originally Posted by Marcus View Post
So, one can learn a caracter and a pronunciation written in pinyin. When we learnt English we learnt the spelling and the transcription of every word. I can say that instead Mandarin has almost no inflection. Finally, no one said that foreigners will know Chinese well, they will do it in the same degree as they do English today.
Again, here you make some good points. In one of my comments above, I suggested the possibility that a Chinese/English "creole" might develop in the future as a successful international language. If this were to happen, one can speculate that such a creole would have the following features:



  1. A core vocabulary (words like sun, moon, water, bread, man, woman, walk, make, sleep, one, two, three...) based mainly on Chinese.
  2. But also a huge number of loanwords derived from "international English" -- that is, words from the English vocabulary that have already been borrowed into many other languages, for example, terms like computer, to televise, gay porn, genetics, cheeseburger -- in many cases replacing the standard Chinese words. (From Google, I find that the Chinese word for "computer" is diàn nǎo, but I would predict that if Chinese began to develop into a global lingua franca, foreigners learning Chinese would prefer to use a word that sounds more or less like "computer", because that's what they're accustomed to in their own languages.)
  3. Practically no inflection, even of English loanwords.
  4. Pinyin romanization as the primary writing system, with the use of Chinese characters being optional.



Yeah, that could work. Wouldn't exactly be Chinese, but it would be MOSTLY Chinese...