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Tones is the obvious answer that others have given, because they are often omitted in written pinyin. But even phonetic representation with tone annotation has problems. Take the following characters as examples:

他: he, him; it 她: she, her

These are both pronounced EXACTLY the same in spoken mandarin, and would be indistinguishable in a phonetic transcription. But standard written Chinese is more expressive than spoken mandarin because it allows for gender clarification.

Also take this example:

買: "mǎi" to buy 賣: "mài" to sell

These have exactly opposite meaning, and are differentiated only by tone. Without tone diacritics you would not be able to distinguish the two apart. Even with tone diacritics, reading is slowed because the difference between the two is only a small, semantically meaningless diacritical mark, whereas 賣 has an extra symbolic component that indicates its meaning.




It is worth noting that the female first person pronoun 她 is a relatively recent invention inspired by republicanism and the rise of venacular writing. Some writers in the 1920s and 30s used a more distinctive word 伊 (pronounced yi1) but over time the homophonic female Ta1 became mainstream.

What also happened then was an influential movement to fully romanise written Chinese and some of the proposals are radical even for today as they plan to do away with tones completely.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinxua_Sin_Wenz

Pinyin was a scaled down version of these except it was never meant to replace the current writing system.


There's a language/dialect called Dongan which is written in Cyrillic without tone markers, and is to some extent mutually intelligible with Mandarin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language




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