Future of the Chinese writing system???

Personally I think Simplified is perfectly adequate for everyone to use.

AuntySue, exactly. Now all we need to know is from which direction the main impacts on software and popular culture will come from in the near future. The route back to traditional is blocked.

I agree with Bazza. I think Simplified is perfect and conveys everything needed to write Chinese. The use of traditional characters isn't really that hard for native speakers who are usually exposed to both all the time from the Taiwanese and HK media. I, however, still have a hard time with traditional but I assume it will come with time. If Chinese was written phonetically than it would begin to eat away at the multitude of Local languages and dialects in China that give it so much linguistic diversity. The ability of the characters to be written the same with the same meaning but spoken differently allows them to be used by a plethora of different languages and dialects. It is what led to their original dominance and adoption as "The writing system" in Asia（as well as the power of the Chinese empire). Hanyu Pinyin is the way to go. I hate when doing research in English how I have to have a friggin wade giles conversion table open sometimes to understand the place names. It is also confusing because some names are translated from Cantonese or other local languages and the name is mandarin is totally different. The adoption of Hanyu Pinyin for all things written in the modern era has been nice.

In William McNaughton's Reading & Writing Chinese, it says that written Chinese is like being able to write down 13 different spoken languages all at the same time.

In some ways it's no so bad now. China benefits from the shorter learning curve of simplified to help further what might be Mao's greatest domestic achievement, universal education. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau preserve the older system for future generations...

Some of those who learnt traditional will tell you that some simplified words are oversimplified, and don't convey the meaning and elegance as well. Singapore teaches simplified BTW, although you do see traditional used by the older generations on stall names and such.

Sure... both simplified and traditional have their own pros and cons... i don't think either one is better... but my question is - does anybody think there will ever be JUST ONE version of chinese writing used throughout the entire world???

IMHO, it's highly unlikely that it'll be unified within the next decade or so, though the reason why I think this is so is touchy.

My totally unreliable prognosis: The big impact factor is the Internet. You need to be able to clearly read small fonts sizes. Think mobile devices. Most traditional characters just turn into indistinguishable boxes when written in a small font on a screen. Traditional characters will stay around for quite a while, which is why being able to read them comes handy (you can pick most up on the way...), but Simplified is the future.

No, I don't think that there should be only one Chinese writing system. Although Simplified is very useful and probably here to stay, I prefer Traditional and strongly hope that it will never be abolished. Also I definitely hope that Chinese writing will never be replaced by something similar to Korean or Japanese. There is really only two variants of Chinese writing, so it not really that much of a 'mess'. Although I do agree that attempts at 'romanizing' Chinese has generally caused more confusion than aiding non-Chinese speakers. But as someone wrote above, I think Hanyu Pinyin is now the globally accepted method.

The arguement about traditional/simplied isn't over, but as far as pinyin I believe that has been settled. There are just a few reminders of old romanization systems still hanging around in places. While I wish China had choose the romanization method I originally learned I'm still glad that everyone seems to be agreeing on one system now-a-days.

I think simplified is just a matter of evolution, traditional will always have it's place in history.

In "Asia's Orthographic Dilemna", WM.C.Hannas reports (p.40) that "A good example of the extent to which some Japanes were prepared to go in dealing with the complexity of their writing system is provided by Mori Arinori (1847-1889), later head of Japan's Ministry of Education, who [...] proposed that English supplant the Japanese language entirely, the latter being unsuited to modern times." Well, the success of ChinesePod tells nothing of the Chinese enthusiasm for English, and with it's predominance in worldwide business, who knows, the Chinese writing question may be a no brainer. And if they're able to transcribe mandarin and cantonese with the same characters, English might work just as well ;-) On the other hand, technolical progress over that past 20 years, from fax (see how it helped Japanese by-pass ascii limitations) to internet to full content digitazing, who knows, this may just remain the subject of arguments amongst scholars, much as Latin, Greek and classical Chinese. The rest of us will have instant translation across languages, voice recognition, whatever content exchange mechanism that will do without keyboards or the need to read. With the spread of video will be back to an entirely oral/visual culture, only computers (i.e. miniature phone combos) will now how to read. Some Chinese will be proven right that all we need to learn is nǐhǎo, the rest won't matter.

mucho typos above, sorry, I typed too fast

Why don't we scrap unicode, it's geting too messy, and do everything in lean efficient Big5 encoding. I mean for all languages. Then we can all use traditional Chinese characters for every language on earth. Bring down the tower of babel I say, let everyone speak the language they want in the manner they like to, let language evolve freely locally and culturally rather than trying to stop it which never succeeds, and have one universal written language that the whole world can communicate with. It seems so obvious! 舌頭在臉頰

AuntySue，I guess you mean （半）开玩笑 （bàn）kāiwánxiaò

Why not keep Simplified for common usage and Traditional for "Higher Learning"? I started out with traditional and now am perfectly happy with simplfied. But for calligraphy or other Ancient studies I would prefer traditional.

Sure, but here's one serious point to ponder. Language cannot (these days) be changed very effectively by legislation, but it is changed easily and rapidly by popular culture and software.

Well, popular culture might go for English in the fast-developing parts of China facing the West then...

KennyK, sorry for my digression above, While it is obviously a question that will be settled by the Chinese people themselves, I think that at some point simplified will become the sole method of writing Chinese. It isn't so much a matter of merit as it is of sheer numbers. That said, I don't expect to live to see the day.