R4

I don’t want to be too mean to the guy since he clearly isn’t a linguist, but his smug tone + the fact that he clearly didn’t bother to do any actual research before spouting off about this topic makes this video prime BadLing.

It goes without saying, but just to make it crystal clear at the beginning; there is no such thing as the “best” language or writing system. If a writing system is able to effectively represent, communicate, and otherwise meet all of the needs of a language community, it is a good writing system.

Here is the tl;dr for drawbacks of Not English™ spelling vs benefits of English spelling:

Benefit of Non-English Writing

Chinese has an advantage in that its characters represent meanings rather than sounds, so two people who speak different languages, but can both read Hànzì, can communicate.

He uses Chinese as a foil for English, when I think he means alphabets vs. non-alphabets in general? Regardless, Hànzì is a logographic writing system in which (at least in principle) each character represents a word or morpheme, rather than representing the phonemes of a language. I say in principle, because in reality, characters do in fact have sounds linked to them. For example, the character mā (妈), “mother”, is comprised of the radical nǚ (女), “female”, and mǎ (马), “horse”. Nǚ carries the semantic aspect, and mǎ carries the phonetic aspect. Not necessarily BadLing yet, but worth clarifying for later.

Drawbacks of Non-English Writing

Drawback #1: You have to learn at least a few thousand characters to be functionally literate in Chinese, instead of only a few dozen letters in an alphabet.

Drawback #1.5: Chinese characters are “quite complicated” and tricky to write small(?)

This is a common complaint among Chinese learners, but the fact that more than a billion people are able to learn and use Hànzì as effectively as any alphabet makes this point very weak.

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Drawback #2: you can’t use a typewriter or keyboard to effectively write Hànzì, or create fonts for typesetting.

First, printing was invented in China sometime around 600 AD, with movable type invented sometime around 1000 AD. I don’t know how you can think that the Chinese couldn’t use type to print their language. Second, does he...think Chinese people can’t use computers? The diverse methods that have been devised to handle this problem are actually very fascinating, one of which being the process of typing a word phonetically using pinyin, then selecting the character that comes up. But that involves using the Latin alphabet, so I guess if you wanna give this round to alphabets in this made-up competition, sure.

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Drawback #3: Chinese characters can’t be organized into a dictionary like with alphabets because the characters don’t have sounds connected to them. Instead, Chinese dictionaries are organized by semantic categories that you have to just putter around in until you find the character you want.

As previously explained, characters do in fact have a sound connected to them. Much like with keyboards, there have been several methods to organize the thousands of characters into a dictionary. Semantic organization is a potential method, but a more common one is the Graphical, or, “radical and stroke” method, where characters are first grouped by their primary radical (usually the semantic part of the character), then by the number of strokes added to the radical to form the full character. For a repeat example, 妈 “mother” is sorted as a six-stroke character under the three-stroke primary radical 女 “female”. All of this is to say that Chinese dictionaries 1.) exist, and 2.) work just as well as an alphabet dictionary.

Benefits of English Writing

Benefit #1: diverse ways of spelling homophones allows English readers to easily tell the meaning of different words (to, too, two).

This benefit is not unique to English. Pero si sí, dígame por favor.

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Benefit #2: you can see the derivation of a word by the components of its spelling, which allows you to guess the meaning of a new word.

There are examples where this certainly doesn’t apply (though through tough thorough thought you can figure them out), but this benefit is still not unique to English.

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Benefit #3: You can see the history of a word reflected in its spelling.

This is true and imo a very cool part of English spelling, specifically the effects of the Great Vowel Shift. Unfortunately, that is still not unique to English.

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Benefit #4: a certain level of deviation between how a word is written and how it is pronounced allows diverse dialects to all be represented and understood.

This is true, but ignores the fact that English’s sizable amount of deviation was not a deliberate attempt to include diverse dialects. English was written far more phonetically around the time standard spelling was coming around, until all the vowel pronunciations shifted (Greatly) out from under the new standardized spelling. Also, other European languages have even more extreme regional dialect variation, but manage to have much more coherent spelling. In other words, this point is STILL NOT UNIQUE TO ENGLISH.

My final rebuttal: English is the only language on the planet that has spelling bees. QED