It's just about typographical economy when writing by hand. English words form complete meanings through writing a few words, and since space is needed, you'd end up having to write a lot and need a lot of space. In a Russian case, which Chinese laymen of foreign languages would be startled, it would be needed to create additional huge blocks of letters for a monument or any construction works because a case marker is needed. In Chinese, you just have to get the "square" things right - the strokes, the shapes, the font...
When writing in Chinese, I can save space because 1) no "space" between words (so, the space button is on the keyboard is useless for Chinese) 2) several characters can convey meanings which would take up more words in English. Since it's hardly inflectional, there is no inflectional endings, and I can even skip some functional words for "handwriting" economy, like the possessive particle 的/之, aspect particle 了, and whenever possible, I can chop up many bisyllabic words into monosyllabic, as long as the message makes sense, like 已經 (already/done/partciple/schon) to 已 (the same thing; only the second character is dependent on this first).
I'm still doubtful whether Chinese has "no inflections" at all, because there are still lots of markers for indicating aspects, yes/no answers/questions and even objects. It just happens that Chinese has nothing as an ending (imagine additional strokes for declensions! how funny...), but some "amateur" Chinese I come across do claim Chinese has cases. One example would be an unknown case for: 把 sth/sb 給 transitive verb 了. (Where 給 may be optional in some cases, and sometimes you can just say "transitive verb + sth/sb" instead of using these markers. I sort of feel that another "subtle" difficulty, besides the (in)famous characters, would be our tradition of skipping things - 50 years ago, the strokes (simplified characters), and for centuries, syllables and even functional words (like pronouns).
When anyone sees the notes and wants to understand, s/he would probably speak the message in the mind by "expanding" 已 back to 已經 (which is used almost exclusively in spoken language anyway). So, things are very dependent on context, and we tend to be very frugal about words. Typographically speaking, my biased view is that English headlines cannot be simplified as much as Chinese ones are.
AFAIK, it seems that particles and any functional words (as opposed to content words) are separated from other words in pinyin.
If pinyin happened to replace hanzi totally in the distant future... I can't predict, but at least before that, I would bet the tones would be gone first.
When writing in Chinese, I can save space because 1) no "space" between words (so, the space button is on the keyboard is useless for Chinese) 2) several characters can convey meanings which would take up more words in English. Since it's hardly inflectional, there is no inflectional endings, and I can even skip some functional words for "handwriting" economy, like the possessive particle 的/之, aspect particle 了, and whenever possible, I can chop up many bisyllabic words into monosyllabic, as long as the message makes sense, like 已經 (already/done/partciple/schon) to 已 (the same thing; only the second character is dependent on this first).
I'm still doubtful whether Chinese has "no inflections" at all, because there are still lots of markers for indicating aspects, yes/no answers/questions and even objects. It just happens that Chinese has nothing as an ending (imagine additional strokes for declensions! how funny...), but some "amateur" Chinese I come across do claim Chinese has cases. One example would be an unknown case for: 把 sth/sb 給 transitive verb 了. (Where 給 may be optional in some cases, and sometimes you can just say "transitive verb + sth/sb" instead of using these markers. I sort of feel that another "subtle" difficulty, besides the (in)famous characters, would be our tradition of skipping things - 50 years ago, the strokes (simplified characters), and for centuries, syllables and even functional words (like pronouns).
When anyone sees the notes and wants to understand, s/he would probably speak the message in the mind by "expanding" 已 back to 已經 (which is used almost exclusively in spoken language anyway). So, things are very dependent on context, and we tend to be very frugal about words. Typographically speaking, my biased view is that English headlines cannot be simplified as much as Chinese ones are.
AFAIK, it seems that particles and any functional words (as opposed to content words) are separated from other words in pinyin.
If pinyin happened to replace hanzi totally in the distant future... I can't predict, but at least before that, I would bet the tones would be gone first.