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I have studied Japanese, and still think that a logographic writing system was a mistake. Consider the time and effort it takes for native speakers to become li

I have studied Japanese, and still think that a logographic writing system was a mistake. Consider the time and effort it takes for native speakers to become literate. I also think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese, which does not contain any sounds that do not have an obvious equivalent in English, and even if it did, we could always repurpose a character or sequence of characters for that sound (do we really need a 'c'). Having said that, the Japanese phonetic system writes voiced sounds as a modification of their unvoiced counterparts. why can't we all do that. The biggest risk of using Latin is that simply sharing an alphabet could cause spelling conventions of other languages to bleed in.

jacobolus 10y ago
> I also do not think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese, [...] You stuck an extra “do not” in your sentence * * * As far as alphabets go, the Phoenician/Greek/Etruscan/Latin alphabet is pretty ad hoc and mediocre. But hey, it’s what we know. At this point, I think we’re stuck with it. Similar story for modern Hindu/Arabic/European numeral glyphs. Learning arithmetic would be noticeably simpler if the glyphs expressed some of the symmetries of the number system. Alas.
- gizmo686 10y ago
  Removed the "do not" As far as the alphabet itself goes, I do not think that Latin is that bad. All symbols have a canonical sound associated with them. The problem is that our usage of the alphabet is horribly inconsistent. This is partially due to the fact that English has sounds that cannot be expressed using the "pure" alphabet. Arguably Japanese has this same problem in their system, with the ゃ、ょ、ゅ modifiers. But at least they distinguish those from や、よ、ゆ by size, and are disciplined about their usage, so we can consider the set of compounds to be their own characters and not have a mess. Of course you still have the ず/づ issue, and the pronunciation of は and を as わ and お in their most common usage. But, even in modern Japanese, these oddities are not universal. Out of curiousity, are you aware of any numeral system that beats Arabic? By pre-Arabic European standards, Arabic numerals are a masterpiece of symmetry.
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    Here’s my proposal for base twelve numerals, http://i.imgur.com/UobIObq.jpg http://i.imgur.com/UobIObq.jpg ; multiplication mod twelve, http://i.imgur.com/dRielBv.jpg http://i.imgur.com/dRielBv.jpg It can also be nice to use a “balanced base”, with digits for negative numbers, e.g. in a base ten context you’d have digits for –4 to 5 (or if you’re willing to have multiple expressions for the same number, –5 to 5). A balanced base twelve multiplication table might look like this: http://i.imgur.com/quEcxH0.png http://i.imgur.com/quEcxH0.png
- mcguire 10y ago
  We should switch to Fëanorean script. It's almost IPA without the notational horrors.
- bhaak 10y ago
  > As far as alphabets go, the Phoenician/Greek/Etruscan/Latin alphabet is pretty ad hoc and mediocre. But hey, it’s what we know. At this point, I think we’re stuck with it. You mix the whole development line of that Latin alphabet into one dismissive argument. I see lots of difference between the Phoenician and the Latin alphabet and FWIW, the Latin alphabet is quite versatile as its wide application shows. It wonder what do you consider mediocre about them? > Similar story for modern Hindu/Arabic/European numeral glyphs. Learning arithmetic would be noticeably simpler if the glyphs expressed some of the symmetries of the number system. Alas. I don't think learning arithmetic would be much simpler with other numerals. Even the Romans could do it and they had one of the worst possible numerical systems. I find our numerals quite fine. My daughter was recognizing numbers before she turned 2. There is some mnemonic to the first four (1 line, 2 corners on the left, 3 corners on the left, 4 corners overall) and most are quite distinct from our Latin letters. 6 and 9 are annoyingly symmetrical of each other, though.
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    Writing a less dismissive / more serious argument about the Latin alphabet would take a few hundred pages. You’re right though, I’m not a speaker of (or expert in) ancient Phoenician, perhaps their alphabet was a bit better structured for that language (it looks pretty ad hoc though). I can primarily speak to the Latin alphabet’s irregularity and mediocrity for representing modern English/Spanish/etc., though it doesn’t seem to have been much better for Greek or Latin. Obviously it works well enough to be the practical anchor for written culture, and I can certainly imagine worse systems (little Egyptian-style pictographs for letters for example). But it’s hardly elegant or systematic. The ordering of the letters is also pretty much arbitrary, and has nothing to do with the separation between consonants and vowels, or the relationship between particular sounds. For an example of a better designed alphabet, check out Korean Hangul. * * * The numerals 1, 2, 3 come from just writing strokes, like tally marks, which over time became connected in handwriting. The other numbers were mostly fairly arbitrary symbols, which morphed slowly over time with occasional replacements and swaps. Otherwise, the symbols have absolutely nothing to do with the numbers they represent or with the base ten number system. Overall, I’d say numbers 0 and 1 are pretty effective. The rest are a huge waste of potential. Same story for the words/names used to represent the numbers. They are made of arbitrary sounds in arbitrary numbers of syllables, reveal nothing about the theoretical properties of the numbers, some of them are hard to say or easy to mistake, etc. Especially for numbers beyond ten, the names are irregular and confusing. This has a real practical impact. Counting is notably easier for Chinese speaking children than for English speakers. > I don't think learning arithmetic would be much simpler with other numerals. Even the Romans could do it and they had one of the worst possible numerical systems. In general, Romans did their arithmetic using little pebbles (“calculus”) on counting board (“abacus”), and used written symbols only for recording the output of their calculations. This made some types of computation very difficult (because using pebbles to record every step gets cumbersome), which helps explain why science has taken off in the past 500 years in Europe after we started developing better notational conventions and using Hindu–Arabic numerals and later decimal fractions, logarithms, etc. My son is about 2 weeks old, so I can’t tell you yet how well he learns arithmetic using a different set of numerals. Ask me again in about 10 years.
rett12 10y ago
Native speakers seem to do fine. Learning a language while growing up, having the Hiragana as a helper, while all your media is written in Japanese makes everything easier. When they finish school they know enough Japanese to go by. It's obviously different for non-native people. Also, it's not like you stop learning even after school. For example English has according to the Oxford dictionary 171,476 words in current use excluding inflections, and several technical and regional vocabularies. Does all English university students know these words?
- ggreer 10y ago
  Logographic systems have some major disadvantages: • It's possible to know how to say a word, but have no clue how to write it. This phenomenon is called character amnesia, and it affects most native speakers.[1] Phonetic languages allow you to write out a misspelled word, which readers can understand (or autocorrect can fix). • Likewise, it's possible to know what a symbol means, but have no idea how to pronounce it. This is extra-fun in Japanese, where most kanji have multiple pronunciations. • Looking up words is harder, as there are no "letters" to sort by. Sorting can be done by stroke count, by radical (four corners or SKIP), or by phonetic spelling (in pinyin or hiragana). Modern technology has made this easier, and some phone apps (like Pleco) can even OCR hanzi. Still, it's far less convenient than phonetic languages. The only aspect in which logographic systems win is information density. You can fit more words on a single page. This is obvious if you've ever seen Chinese or Japanese copies of works that were originally written in English. The Harry Potter books are crazy thin. Also, Chinese and Japanese tweets can express a paragraph of information. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
  - andrioni 10y ago
    >• It's possible to know how to say a word, but have no clue how to write it. This phenomenon is called character amnesia, and it affects most native speakers.[1] Phonetic languages allow you to write out a misspelled word, which readers can understand (or autocorrect can fix). > >• Likewise, it's possible to know what a symbol means, but have no idea how to pronounce it. This is extra-fun in Japanese, where most kanji have multiple pronunciations. I don't think English is much better in these cases. In fact, the writing can be so divorced from speech that spelling bees are a thing.
fenomas 10y ago
> I also think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese Writing Japanese entirely in Latin characters would be no different from writing it entirely in hiragana. Have you ever tried reading that way?
- gizmo686 10y ago
  Kind of. In my first semester of japanese we worked in hiragana+spaces. Having read English language papers on Japanese linguistics, I can also say that reading the Latin is easy too.
  - fenomas 10y ago
    Sure, I didn't mean to suggest it can't be done in short spurts. But reading a novel that way would be hellish. The larger point being, Japanese isn't locked into using a logographic system - it already has two phonetic syllabaries that people could start using exclusively if there was some advantage to doing so.
  - cthalupa 10y ago
    That sounds like an absolutely miserable experience. I'd rather be forced to look up every 3rd or 4th kanji than try to deal with all hiragana writing.
Jack000 10y ago
by that measure we should forget about historical languages and learn something constructed like esperanto. languages are not solely a means of communication but a part of a people's cultural identity. I think the greater dependence on contextual cues and ambiguity in Chinese/Japanese lends itself much better for linguistic art forms like poetry and literature.
rogual 10y ago
> the Japanese phonetic system writes voiced sounds as a modification of their unvoiced counterparts. why can't we all do that. Fun fact, we do do that in English, at least for C and G. (G was introduced as a modified C to indicate the voicing).

jacobolus 10y ago

> I also do not think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese, [...] You stuck an extra “do not” in your sentence * * * As far as alphabets go, the Phoenician/Greek/Etruscan/Latin alphabet is pretty ad hoc and mediocre. But hey, it’s what we know. At this point, I think we’re stuck with it. Similar story for modern Hindu/Arabic/European numeral glyphs. Learning arithmetic would be noticeably simpler if the glyphs expressed some of the symmetries of the number system. Alas.

gizmo686 10y ago
Removed the "do not" As far as the alphabet itself goes, I do not think that Latin is that bad. All symbols have a canonical sound associated with them. The problem is that our usage of the alphabet is horribly inconsistent. This is partially due to the fact that English has sounds that cannot be expressed using the "pure" alphabet. Arguably Japanese has this same problem in their system, with the ゃ、ょ、ゅ modifiers. But at least they distinguish those from や、よ、ゆ by size, and are disciplined about their usage, so we can consider the set of compounds to be their own characters and not have a mess. Of course you still have the ず/づ issue, and the pronunciation of は and を as わ and お in their most common usage. But, even in modern Japanese, these oddities are not universal. Out of curiousity, are you aware of any numeral system that beats Arabic? By pre-Arabic European standards, Arabic numerals are a masterpiece of symmetry.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  Here’s my proposal for base twelve numerals, http://i.imgur.com/UobIObq.jpg http://i.imgur.com/UobIObq.jpg ; multiplication mod twelve, http://i.imgur.com/dRielBv.jpg http://i.imgur.com/dRielBv.jpg It can also be nice to use a “balanced base”, with digits for negative numbers, e.g. in a base ten context you’d have digits for –4 to 5 (or if you’re willing to have multiple expressions for the same number, –5 to 5). A balanced base twelve multiplication table might look like this: http://i.imgur.com/quEcxH0.png http://i.imgur.com/quEcxH0.png
mcguire 10y ago
We should switch to Fëanorean script. It's almost IPA without the notational horrors.
bhaak 10y ago
> As far as alphabets go, the Phoenician/Greek/Etruscan/Latin alphabet is pretty ad hoc and mediocre. But hey, it’s what we know. At this point, I think we’re stuck with it. You mix the whole development line of that Latin alphabet into one dismissive argument. I see lots of difference between the Phoenician and the Latin alphabet and FWIW, the Latin alphabet is quite versatile as its wide application shows. It wonder what do you consider mediocre about them? > Similar story for modern Hindu/Arabic/European numeral glyphs. Learning arithmetic would be noticeably simpler if the glyphs expressed some of the symmetries of the number system. Alas. I don't think learning arithmetic would be much simpler with other numerals. Even the Romans could do it and they had one of the worst possible numerical systems. I find our numerals quite fine. My daughter was recognizing numbers before she turned 2. There is some mnemonic to the first four (1 line, 2 corners on the left, 3 corners on the left, 4 corners overall) and most are quite distinct from our Latin letters. 6 and 9 are annoyingly symmetrical of each other, though.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  Writing a less dismissive / more serious argument about the Latin alphabet would take a few hundred pages. You’re right though, I’m not a speaker of (or expert in) ancient Phoenician, perhaps their alphabet was a bit better structured for that language (it looks pretty ad hoc though). I can primarily speak to the Latin alphabet’s irregularity and mediocrity for representing modern English/Spanish/etc., though it doesn’t seem to have been much better for Greek or Latin. Obviously it works well enough to be the practical anchor for written culture, and I can certainly imagine worse systems (little Egyptian-style pictographs for letters for example). But it’s hardly elegant or systematic. The ordering of the letters is also pretty much arbitrary, and has nothing to do with the separation between consonants and vowels, or the relationship between particular sounds. For an example of a better designed alphabet, check out Korean Hangul. * * * The numerals 1, 2, 3 come from just writing strokes, like tally marks, which over time became connected in handwriting. The other numbers were mostly fairly arbitrary symbols, which morphed slowly over time with occasional replacements and swaps. Otherwise, the symbols have absolutely nothing to do with the numbers they represent or with the base ten number system. Overall, I’d say numbers 0 and 1 are pretty effective. The rest are a huge waste of potential. Same story for the words/names used to represent the numbers. They are made of arbitrary sounds in arbitrary numbers of syllables, reveal nothing about the theoretical properties of the numbers, some of them are hard to say or easy to mistake, etc. Especially for numbers beyond ten, the names are irregular and confusing. This has a real practical impact. Counting is notably easier for Chinese speaking children than for English speakers. > I don't think learning arithmetic would be much simpler with other numerals. Even the Romans could do it and they had one of the worst possible numerical systems. In general, Romans did their arithmetic using little pebbles (“calculus”) on counting board (“abacus”), and used written symbols only for recording the output of their calculations. This made some types of computation very difficult (because using pebbles to record every step gets cumbersome), which helps explain why science has taken off in the past 500 years in Europe after we started developing better notational conventions and using Hindu–Arabic numerals and later decimal fractions, logarithms, etc. My son is about 2 weeks old, so I can’t tell you yet how well he learns arithmetic using a different set of numerals. Ask me again in about 10 years.

rett12 10y ago

Native speakers seem to do fine. Learning a language while growing up, having the Hiragana as a helper, while all your media is written in Japanese makes everything easier. When they finish school they know enough Japanese to go by. It's obviously different for non-native people. Also, it's not like you stop learning even after school. For example English has according to the Oxford dictionary 171,476 words in current use excluding inflections, and several technical and regional vocabularies. Does all English university students know these words?

ggreer 10y ago
Logographic systems have some major disadvantages: • It's possible to know how to say a word, but have no clue how to write it. This phenomenon is called character amnesia, and it affects most native speakers.[1] Phonetic languages allow you to write out a misspelled word, which readers can understand (or autocorrect can fix). • Likewise, it's possible to know what a symbol means, but have no idea how to pronounce it. This is extra-fun in Japanese, where most kanji have multiple pronunciations. • Looking up words is harder, as there are no "letters" to sort by. Sorting can be done by stroke count, by radical (four corners or SKIP), or by phonetic spelling (in pinyin or hiragana). Modern technology has made this easier, and some phone apps (like Pleco) can even OCR hanzi. Still, it's far less convenient than phonetic languages. The only aspect in which logographic systems win is information density. You can fit more words on a single page. This is obvious if you've ever seen Chinese or Japanese copies of works that were originally written in English. The Harry Potter books are crazy thin. Also, Chinese and Japanese tweets can express a paragraph of information. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
- andrioni 10y ago
  >• It's possible to know how to say a word, but have no clue how to write it. This phenomenon is called character amnesia, and it affects most native speakers.[1] Phonetic languages allow you to write out a misspelled word, which readers can understand (or autocorrect can fix). > >• Likewise, it's possible to know what a symbol means, but have no idea how to pronounce it. This is extra-fun in Japanese, where most kanji have multiple pronunciations. I don't think English is much better in these cases. In fact, the writing can be so divorced from speech that spelling bees are a thing.

fenomas 10y ago

> I also think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese Writing Japanese entirely in Latin characters would be no different from writing it entirely in hiragana. Have you ever tried reading that way?

gizmo686 10y ago
Kind of. In my first semester of japanese we worked in hiragana+spaces. Having read English language papers on Japanese linguistics, I can also say that reading the Latin is easy too.
- fenomas 10y ago
  Sure, I didn't mean to suggest it can't be done in short spurts. But reading a novel that way would be hellish. The larger point being, Japanese isn't locked into using a logographic system - it already has two phonetic syllabaries that people could start using exclusively if there was some advantage to doing so.
- cthalupa 10y ago
  That sounds like an absolutely miserable experience. I'd rather be forced to look up every 3rd or 4th kanji than try to deal with all hiragana writing.

Jack000 10y ago

by that measure we should forget about historical languages and learn something constructed like esperanto. languages are not solely a means of communication but a part of a people's cultural identity. I think the greater dependence on contextual cues and ambiguity in Chinese/Japanese lends itself much better for linguistic art forms like poetry and literature.

rogual 10y ago

> the Japanese phonetic system writes voiced sounds as a modification of their unvoiced counterparts. why can't we all do that. Fun fact, we do do that in English, at least for C and G. (G was introduced as a modified C to indicate the voicing).