They are less advanced than phonetic languages, which evolved later. That they are still used speaks more for tradition than utility. China has an ancient culture that reached high levels very early on in relation to most other regions and it is this ancient tradition that is respected, not the ideograms used in Chinese writing, which are a PITA for everybody involved.
There is a reason why writing evolved from pictograms to ideograms to phonetic alphabets and that, to my knowledge, there has been no recorded instance of evolution in the opposite direction.
I don't see the parallel between ideograms and leetspeak, which is really nothing more than a form of shorthand. |
