&gt; But the information density of a language has to go somewhere. In English, I guess this is facilitated by a relatively granular sound system and complex grammar. Mandarin ended up with a relatively simple and inflexible sound system and simple grammar, so the complexity went into the characters.<p>What do you mean by &quot;information density of a language&quot;? The way you used it makes it sound like a human language must have a certain &quot;information density&quot; to be useful, and that in English this is achieved via complex grammar but in Mandarin it is achieved via complex characters.<p>That is confusing to me, because if a certain level of information density is necessary for an effective human language, then wouldn&#x27;t it be necessary to have that in both the spoken form and the written form of that language?<p>With most languages, the written form and the spoken form are essentially the same language. Any sentence in one can be expressed in the other. People often use longer sentences and more complex sentences when writing, and use more redundancy when speaking, but that is due to the medium, not the language being expressed using that medium--with the written language the reader can control the rate of reading and can jump around in a sentence if needed to deal with complexity, so longer and more complex sentences work better written than spoken. They are still the same language. One <i>could</i> write just like one speaks, or speak just like one writes. Is this not the case with Mandarin?