Pictograph system versus the alphabet

What's the word for believing one's culture to be superior to all others?

In Ong's book, he claims that the Chinese writing system is "time-consuming and elitest" p 86. He goes on to say that undoubtably, once the Chinese have seen the light and started to speak in a mutually comprehensible language, that they will automatically switch to the much simpler and clearly superior roman alphabet.

So I wanted to take a closer look at the differences and similarities of the Chinese writing system to our own writing system. The first thing that caught my attention was that Ong claimed that it took 20 plus years to become "significantly learned" in the Chinese writing system. But isn't that what it takes us in our own system? If it takes less than than 20 years, then why are we in college, majoring in English? We should already have mastered the depth and breadth of our language at the end of high school, right? In truth, grammer can be learned well by the end of fifth grade, but the nuances, shades of meaning, and spelling can take much longer, perhaps another 15 years and more. That's not so different than Ong's claim of 20 years to learn the Chinese writing system.

The K'anghsi dictionary, Ong says, contains 40,545 different characters. And nobody actually knows all of them! Did you know that the Oxford English Dictionary 2 contains 263,917 entries? http://www.oed.com/news/updates/revisions0812.html (And that's not including the various word forms that go with them.) I'm going to out on a limb here, and suggest that Ong cannot find an English speaker that knows all of those, either. As users of an alphabet, we do have an advantage here, in that even if we cannot spell the word we want correctly, we have enough of a basis in phonetics to be able to understand the intention, for the most part, of the writer, whereas, Chinese symbols misdrawn may be incopmrehensible. But the Chinese have an advantage that I feel equals that: Their symbols are mutually comprehesible between various languages, while we run into trouble the second we try to read another language.

Lastly, but surely not least, Ong attempts to make light of his disparaging analysis by writing, "The loss of liturature will be enormous, but not so enormous as a Chinese typewriter using over 40,000 character." Ha, ha, WalteRong. Somehow, I find the loss of liturature, in any language, less than laughable. If anybody is interested, here is a picture and article of the Chinese typewriter, developed by a Dr. Lin Yutang in 1946: http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/01/07/new-typewriter-conquers-chinese-symbols/ (I recommend just reading the news article, the blogger who posted underneath it, doesn't really have a grasp of the machine or the Chinese language, and so is confused and confusing.)
This typewriter, it must be said, is much more complex than our own, and in the time one would need to learn how to use it whatever it was that needed to be typed could have been hand written and delivered.

Oh, yes, it's called ethnocentrism.

Unrelated, exept in pure coincidence, there is a movie, unfortunately only available in Europe at this time, called The Chinese Typewriter starring Tom Selleck. It's amazing what one finds on Google! If anybody has this movie, I would like to see it. Seriously! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0319180/