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If English was written like Chinese (1999)
The English spelling system is such a pain, we'd might as well switch to hanzi-- Chinese characters. How should we go about it? One way would be to use hanzi directly, asthe Japanese do.
If someone asks where a word comes from, we (now) think of its original phonetic form; we say for instance that language comes from French langage, itself derived from Latin lingua'tongue', which in turn comes from Proto-Indo-European dnghu. the limited role of pictograms the clever compound pictures (indeed all three examples are from Chinese) the phonetic-and-radical system (97% of Chinese characters work this way) the inclusion of radicals as part of the character (rather than as separate symbols, as in cuneiform or hieroglyphic writing) the relative information content of radicals and phonetics compounds used as secondary phonetics the handling of multisyllabic and foreign words the handling of subsyllabic morphemes (the model here is Mandarin-r, represented by ér) the organization of dictionaries (in fact, the graphic at the top of the page shows part of the radical index for a Chinese dictionary, organized by stroke count) the psychological effects. Also, English has borrowed so much that it often has five or six morphemes where Chinese would have just one-- compare wáng vs. king, regal, royal, regicide, Rex, or zì vs. word, verb, logograph, bon mot.
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