The problem with the pitch accent is that it varies so much by region that if you included them in the kana (like the universal phonetic alphabet) you would end

The problem with the pitch accent is that it varies so much by region that if you included them in the kana (like the universal phonetic alphabet) you would end up with something that was completely unreadable by people from a different prefecture. (Ok, I'm taking that to an extreme, but still. The Japanese have enough problems with various dialects without putting pitches in the written language. I think I would cry.) Yeah, that's definitely true. You would have to use it just for 標準語, sort of like how pinyin with tonal diacritics is primarily used for Standard Mandarin, since something like 関西弁 would look completely different. By the way, I remember reading (on HN, I believe) that a lot of the problems with English spelling are a result of the original typesetters (i.e., for Gutenberg-style printing presses) being Dutch, so they failed to accurately spell a lot of English words. And Esperanto is for noobs ;) If you want to see a real conlang built from the ground up, check out Ilaksh: http://www.ithkuil.net/ilaksh/Ilaksh_Intro.html http://www.ithkuil.net/ilaksh/Ilaksh_Intro.html