Mark Rosenfelder’s Yingzi attempts “to lay out, by analogy, the nature and structure of the Chinese writing system.” He sketches out an English-based alternative to Chinese characters (hanzi), applying the same concepts:
- the limited role of pictograms
- the clever compound pictures (indeed all three examples are from Chinese)
- the phonetic-and-radical system (97% of Chinese characters work this way)
- the inclusion of radicals as part of the character (rather than as separate symbols, as in cuneiform or hieroglyphic writing)
- the relative information content of radicals and phonetics
- compounds used as secondary phonetics
- the handling of multisyllabic and foreign words
- the handling of subsyllabic morphemes (the model here is Mandarin -r, represented by ér)
- the organization of dictionaries (in fact, the graphic at the top of the page shows part of the radical index for a Chinese dictionary, organized by stroke count)
- the psychological effects.