Anybody care to explain why "costs of reprinting/copying was far lower compared to other forms of phonetic systems"? I know nothing about printing technology but I'm a Chinese.
Far many more symbols are required to represent a word with alphabetical systems. I used 65 symbols and 11 spaces to write this sentence whereas with ideograms I'd need about 13 symbols.
OIC, To express the same meaning, using Chinese needs far more less physical space than using English.
And you know what? Classical Chinese takes the compactness to the next level ;D
I'll try give an example:
English:
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Chinese:
敏捷的棕毛狐狸从懶狗身上跃过
Classical Chinese：
棕色敏狐跃懶犬
Note: This is composed by me, maybe not very well-written, and maybe it can be even more compact, but you see what I mean ;)
