Other than its traditional significance, is there any other reason why Chinese schools don't just teach Pinyin instead of thousands of Chinese characters?
This exact debate has happened in China. A poet wrote this poem to explain the problem of only using pinyin:
“Shi and the Ten Stone Lions”: Riddle or Nonsense? & Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den - Wikipedia
Since no one can solve the problem the attempt to get rid of character has mostly stopped.
Update:
One of the things that I’ve noticed about modern Mandarin is that most words now come in pairs that often have almost the same meanings or are combined to mean something. If there is no second character then often the same character is used twice instead. Sometimes the order doesn’t matter but sometimes only one order is correct for no specific reason. Also, one combination will be common in one city while another combination is common in another city but both are valid.
As someone learning Chinese, a common phrase is “Do you mean character from two-character word“.
Based on my limited understanding of Chinese history my guess is that as the language evolved people made up new characters for new words and often two people made a different character for the same word at roughly the same time. As the language mixed and evolved people often said one character which wasn’t understood then said the other one. That got annoying so they started to say both characters by default so that people from different areas would understand then it became common to just say both.
One issue is that this isn’t is ALWAYS true. Often when it isn’t ambiguous only a single character is used for a multi-character word but you have to know which one it is. If everything was a double character I think you could possibly get rid of characters but then you lose a lot of flexibility to use short versions and common abbreviations unless you then add spaces and punctuation. I could be wrong.
You can see that in Chinese Idioms (Chengyu) they only use a single character instead of the more modern double characters. I cannot read ancient Chinese writing but I assume (please let me know in the comments if I am wrong) that a lot of them will only use single characters instead of double characters if you go back far enough.
The English equivalents are:
- Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo - Wikipedia
- James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher - Wikipedia
Similar but not as long.
There is also:
- 妈妈骑马马慢妈妈骂马; (māma qí mǎ, mǎ màn, māma mà mǎ)
Notice that punctuation and spaces are added for it to make sense.