Harvard physicist's take on the VMS

[rikforto]

There is no logic in Chinese either. Because of their stupidity and redundancy, they had to start simplifying them in the 20th century.

This is not true, in either part. The Chinese characters are not usually analyzable, but they are made from a few hundred parts with pretty clear patterns. In many cases it is possible for someone familiar with the script and the spoken form to "sound out" an unfamiliar character from the clues they contain, and I have done so many times myself. (I have also blundered straight into traps and inconsistency in the system, so the point that the system is not a product of pure reason is well taken.) 

Likewise, the PRC did not "have" to reform the character set; Taiwan achieved universal literacy sooner without the reforms, a fact that almost certainly owes less to the merits of either system than to the social situation in each polity, but rebuts the claim simplification was necessary. Evidence of a benefit in learning one system or the other is mixed at best, but the simplified characters, despite their name, are actually a more complicated system to describe from the top-down, having more redundant radicals, more patterns, and more homographs. Some of this owes to the fact that the reform was never completed, but some of it would remain if the rest of the character set were "simplified"

I am once again asking people who cannot read Chinese characters to be very cautious when describing the script!

[ololololo]

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[Mauro]

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[Koen G]

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[Jorge_Stolfi]

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[Mauro]

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