I've read many articles of this sort, but I cite this one because it is fairly recent and is from a reputable newspaper.
If you’ve spent any time learning Japanese or just getting around Japan, you’ve probably come across romaji — the Roman alphabet version of Japanese. It shows up on signs, maps, train stations and in most textbooks for foreign learners. But not all romaji is the same. Depending on where you look, you might see shi spelled as shi, si or even something else.
Draft Minutes of UTC (Unicode Technical Committee) Meeting 185 Cupertino, California, United States — October 27-29, 2025 Hosted by Apple in Cupertino and virtually UTC #185 Agenda Revision date: November 26, 2025
Photograph from Neil Kubler of a sign in front of a gift shop in Penghu, Taiwan selling Pénghú wénshí 澎湖文石 ("Pescadores aragonite"); its name in Chinese, wénshí 文石 literally means "patterned stone", an apt characterization for this carbonate mineral which is favored by sculptors.
Around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, there were countless Chinese intellectuals and common citizens who perceived that their nation was in such desperate straits that something drastic had to be done or it would collapse altogether. Many of these concerned citizens focused on the archaic script as unsuited for the purposes of modern science. Others concentrated on the "unsayable" classical / literary language (wényán 文言) as primarily responsible for China's backwardness, which resulted in Japan's defeat of China in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95). There were scores upon scores of reformers, the best minds of the country, who put forward a broad variety of proposals for language and script reform.
Well, first of all, the difficulty of learning a language can only be measured relative to the language(s) the learner already knows. Japanese is easier for Koreans than for Americans; I would guess Chinese is easier for English speakers than, say, Arabic speakers. Second, language isn't writing. Learning to write Japanese or Chinese is hardly a snap even for native speakers.
After coming face to face with the unavoidable debacles inherent in mechanical Chinese typewriters (not to mention many other pitfalls of the writing system), Language Log readers will not be surprised to learn that sinographs were not well suited for telegraphy:
We have mentioned the Dungan people and their unique language many times on Language Log. How did it happen that we at Penn have a connection with the Dungans, a small group (less than a hundred thousand) of Sinitic speakers who have lived in the center of Asia (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) since the latter part of the 19th century? They fled there from northwest China, many of them dying along the way, after revolting against the Manchu Qing government.
On Language Log and in Sino-Platonic Papers, we have often focused on the rise of romanization for Sinitic languages, especially as engendered by the Jesuits and other Catholic orders. In this post, I would like to introduce an Italian Ph.D. thesis that does a commendable job of surveying what transpired in this regard during the 16th through 18th centuries:
The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (TPC) was first planted by British missionaries in Tainan, which later expanded to all southern parts of Taiwan, constituting the present Southern Synod of TPC. The most important pioneer among them was the Scottish missionary Rev. Thomas Barclay who worked in Taiwan-Fu (the present Tainan). He was born in Glasgow, and matriculated at the University of Glasgow. While there, he studied under Sir William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin [according to Wikipedia]. The celebrated Lord Kelvin reminds me of the absolute zero degree in physical chemistry and the electric cable equation as the underpinning of the Transatlantic cable as well as the conduction of electric impulses along nerve fibers.
