8 ms·

Japanese is an unusual language to write. It's influenced by Chinese (in two separate eras), English and perhaps many other systems. Symbols alone aren't a perf

• akavi 10y ago
  Why wouldn't an "English style" (roman alphabet) style alphabet work? Romaji works just fine, albeit with the addition of a macron diacritic. Though if it really was the primary writing system, a way to notate tone accent might be necessary (My gut says no, it carries relatively little semantic weight).
  • sidedishes 10y ago
    There are a lot of homophones between Chinese loanwords in Japanese. A writing system like Romaji that only records the phonetic information would be no more useful than just hiragana (which might then arguably more useful as it aligns with the syllables?)
    • Margh 10y ago
      Spaces carry a lot of semantic weight, as do other components such as capitalisation and punctuation (most of which in use in Japan is borrowed from romaji anyway). iimagineitdgetprettyannoyingtryingtoreadenglishifitwaswrittenlikethisbutitshardtotellwithouthavingdonesofortwentyyears
      • sidedishes 10y ago
        Well, in English spaces certainly carry weight, partly because the word unit has so many characters. In languages like Chinese and Japanese, units /are/ the characters (or a few of them). Particles then make natural separators in strings of kanji.
        • Margh 10y ago
          That's exactly why you need more than just hiragana, it'd be too difficult to tell what each character was parf of at speed. Something like katakana replacing kanji and hiragana for particles would be perfect. Modern Japanese could learn a few lessons from hangul imo.
    • E6300 10y ago
      It would also be no more or less useful than just speaking. Do Japanese people carry around flash cards with kanji on them to disambiguate their speech?
      • sidedishes 10y ago
        No, but that's spoken Japanese. Different phrases are prevalent between spoken and written Japanese, as a workaround for those ambiguities.
      • zhemao 10y ago
        There are non verbal cues or different nuances in inflection that help disambiguate. There's also situational context. Furthermore, people use simpler language when speaking then when writing. In Chinese, which has even more homophones, it is quite difficult to tease out the meaning of a passage written phonetically (in hanyu pinyin). When speaking and there is a word out of context (such as a name), it is necessary to explicitly disambiguate by putting the word in a common phrase or describing the characters constituent parts. For instance, I would introduce my self as "Zhe as in 'philosophy', Hao which is 'sun' on top of 'sky'".
      • alannallama 10y ago
        It's actually not uncommon when speaking to have to either draw a kanji in the air, or refer to the symbol you mean by cross-referencing another word that uses it to disambiguate.
  • rett12 10y ago
    It doesn't work due to the insane amount of homophones. When you are speaking with someone you have context and you can discern the meaning of what it's said. But random words or texts can change it's meaning depending of what character is used. And the tone system doesn't help as it can be seen in Chinese pinyin. For example, how many kanji can be read as 'shuu'/しゅう: http://jisho.org/search/%E3%81%97%E3%82%85%E3%81%86%20%23kanji http://jisho.org/search/%E3%81%97%E3%82%85%E3%81%86%20%23kan... Try to do that with tones.
    • akavi 10y ago
      Why do you have less context in writing than in speech? I'd be willing to bet heavily that the vast majority of those "homophones" are primarily writing-only, domain specific or archaic "shorthands", which are referred to in speech with slightly more verbose alternatives. Switching to a non-character based system would admittedly in that case mean some domain specific writing would be slightly less compact, but that seems a reasonable tradeoff given the unwieldiness of the current writing system.
      • fourneau 10y ago
        It's not that you have less context, as much as you /need/ less context. Instead of a few extra words to describe something, you get a different character. Here's a great example of how in writing you can disambiguate "aunt"/"older woman": https://twitter.com/MaggieSensei/status/765769637372030977 https://twitter.com/MaggieSensei/status/765769637372030977 In the above example all three are read as おば (pronounced: oba). When spoken you still need to differentiate, but it'd either be obvious from context or you'd just explain it manually.
      • fenomas 10y ago
        > I'd be willing to bet heavily that ... You'd lose your bet. In that "shuu" link as an example, most (10-12 or so) are common enough that you might hear them in a typical newscast, with that pronunciation. What makes things manageable is the combinatorics. E.g. there are dozens of kanji read "shuu", and many dozens more read "kan", but most of them are only read that way when part of a 2-character compound, and only a small subset of the possible "shuukan"s are words, and only a subset of those words are common in spoken conversation. Even then, it is a very homophone-heavy language. I can think of four "shuukan"s off the top of my head that you might hear from a newsreader; it would only be after those that you'd get into domain-specific words. This is pretty typical.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• partycoder 10y ago
  But then Chinese moved to simplified Chinese, making some symbols very different.