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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 us
by 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 agoSpaces 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 agoWell, 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 agoThat'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 agoIt 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 agoNo, but that's spoken Japanese. Different phrases are prevalent between spoken and written Japanese, as a workaround for those ambiguities.
- zhemao 10y agoThere 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 agoIt'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.