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Japanese is very phoneme-poor. If they switched entirely to hiragana there would be too many indistinguishable homophones. Korean has more phonemes and escapes
by dibujante 10y ago
Japanese is very phoneme-poor. If they switched entirely to hiragana there would be too many indistinguishable homophones. Korean has more phonemes and escapes this somewhat.
Of course, it would still be possible, but Japanese would have to develop some hiragana redundancy (multiple symbols all meaning the same syllable) so that homophones could be spelled differently.
- yomly 10y agoDuring the cultural revolution, the complete romanization of Chinese was explored. The idea was ultimately abandoned much for a similar reason Japanese will probably struggle to go character-free: there would be too much ambiguity in the written language. This poem was the go to for people against romanization[0] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...