Recently on HN on vietnamese writing <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10888755" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10888755</a> and how the population of Vietman grew rapidly literate with the romanisation of the written language.<p>Another thing comes to mind: movable type printing could not take off without the small set of characters of an alphabet.
The efforts to simplify chinese characters come from the realization that it held back the country&#x27;s literacy.