Let's see the problem regarding the Chinese writing System: Chinese characters are hard to memorize and to write. A foreigner learning English or any other alphabetic language could immediately be literate these language. While the same person learning Chinese would take years to be literate.
I don’t think current Chinese writing system will survive, especially with the coming of computer age. Just think about it, Unicode is almost entirely filled with Kanji/Hanzi. Looking for an entry in a Chinese dictionary is much slower compared to an alphabetic dictionary. There are other problems such as database sorting, etc. I understand that many people love the current writing system, but its death is inevitable.
PRC tried to make it easier by simplifying it, but it’s still to complex. The only way out is, of course, to phonetize it. The problem is, Chinese always complain that phonetization will make it too ambiguous to read because of homophones in Chinese language. To overcome this problem, an indicator to differentiate homophones could be used. I don’t know if anyone ever proposed such system.
For example, shi1: teacher, carry out, poetry, lion and wet. You can use the element indicator at the left, and the bopomofo letters at the middle, and the tone indicator at the right. It will look like this:
shi1
亻ㄕ teacher
扌ㄕ carry out
讠ㄕ poetry
犭ㄕ lion
氵ㄕ wet
mu4
目ㄇㄨˋ eye
木ㄇㄨˋ wood
日ㄇㄨˋ dusk
Let’s take a look at mu4 (eye and wood). In the first columns, “eye” indicator for eye and “wood” indicator for wood are used respectively to avoid homonimity. In the second column, bopomofo letters (pronunciation guide) are written vertically (I can’t write them vertically here, so I write them horizontally instead). In the last column, a tone indicator is added. So, a keyboard entry would require two to five entry for a word.
The number of indicators would, of course, depend on the number of homophones for each Chinese character and the number of elements imaginable. Some examples of these are: wood, fire/temperature, water, land/soil/rock, body/anatomy, metal/gold, hand/action, event, sun/day/time/weather, mouth/speech/names, animal, number/mathematics, mind/intention/imagination, etc. Twenty or more indicators should be enough. For words with many homophones like yi4 (more than forty) of shi4 (more than thirty), homonymity can’t be avoided, so, a ”miscellaneous” indicator would be enough for rarely used words, empty words (words that must be joined with other words to have a meaning). Not all homonymity could be avoided, but this reduces ambiguity.
So, we need in total: 20 or more element indicator + 37 letters in bopomofo + 4 tone indicator = 61 or more letters.
BTW, I’ve a question. How do you make a font in Chinese language? Do you have to draw all the Chinese characters?
). Using bopomofo in conjunction with the radicals is one of the more imaginative attempts I've seen to replace Hanzi.
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