5 ms·

I'll highlight Japanese because that is what I know. A lot of imagery can be conveyed with choice of characters. Whether alternate readings in a novel, or bril

by bojo 4y ago

I'll highlight Japanese because that is what I know. A lot of imagery can be conveyed with choice of characters. Whether alternate readings in a novel, or brilliant neon signs on the street, you get a lot more information at a glance due to the overloaded meaning of the word being represented. Even more so in the case of compound words. In spoken language you say のむ (nomu) - to drink, and contextually it doesn't matter how it's used. However, in writing 飲む means to drink a liquid, while 呑む means to drink alcohol. Imagine an author using the former for the latter as a particular word choice, probably to convey something like an alcoholic drinking alcohol as if it were water! The language also has the problem of having a ridiculous amount of homophones. Deciding to use the more phonetic-like hiragana system inversely makes adult level reading even more difficult, not simpler. Texts would become longer (one character kanji vs multiple hiragana), and the implied meaning would be lost.

dougmwne 4y ago
Homophones don’t seems like they would be a problem intuitively. If a homophone can exist in the spoken language and retain meaning, then it would be able to exist in the written language too without a loss of meaning.
- bojo 4y ago
  To your point I came across this a moment ago: https://selftaughtjapanese.com/2014/03/19/research-results-homophones-in-japanese/ https://selftaughtjapanese.com/2014/03/19/research-results-h... While there are a ridiculous amount of homophones (top 3 are 45, 38, 31!), it does look like the total number of words that include them is at 3.4%, increasing outside of daily language as you step into more specific topics. Not exactly small, but not as dramatic as I had pictured either. English apparently has 7-15% depending on what you reference by comparison. The biggest difference is that while they are individual words in English, they are only word components in Japanese, which is why I'd say it's arguably harder. Not impossible of course, children are taught with spaced out hiragana at first, eventually learning the more compact non-spaced version of the language as they incorporate more kanji to help with word boundaries.
- bluepizza 4y ago
  I think "kou" has more than 30 meanings, which is maddening even while speaking. But the in person context is not the same as written context. There are several elements of context, such place, people, situation, which are obvious to parse in a spoken conversation, but would have to be introduced when writing.
adrian_b 4y ago
The ridiculous amount of homophones is due to what I consider as a big mistake, the Japanese did not only import the Chinese writing, but they also imported the Chinese readings of the Chinese symbols. The import of the Chinese readings has created some homophones between Chinese words and native Japanese words and also many times more homophones between distinct Chinese words that had different pronunciation in Chinese, but which are pronounced identically by the Japanese. Spoken Japanese has a higher proportion of native Japanese words, but written Japanese has frequently much more words that are derived from mispronounced Chinese words than native Japanese words. Scientific and technical literature has an overwhelming proportion of words derived from Chinese, because it contains a large proportion of compound words. Most compound words in Japanese use the Chinese pronunciation of the signs, because the native Japanese words are usually longer. Had the Japanese always used the Chinese signs only with the native Japanese readings, there would have been no ambiguities due to homophones and it would have also been easy to transition to any other writing system, if they would have ever wanted that. As it is now, it is unlikely that the Japanese writing system could ever be simplified. The argument that changing the current Japanese writing system would disconnect the people from their cultural heritage, is much less valid than it would seem, as I have discovered when attempting to read some books written before the first World War. Even if the simplifications in Japanese have been far less than in the transition from Traditional Chinese writing to Simplified Chinese writing, nevertheless in modern Japanese there are a large number of kanji that have been modified from their versions used one hundred years ago. Also many hiragana/katakana spellings have been modified, to reflect modern Japanese pronunciation. So for reading Japanese writings with an age of more than one century, you need to learn much more than for reading modern Japanese, and that is true also for the native Japanese people. Reading old Japanese books is far more difficult for Japanese people, than reading a book published in 1500 AD, or a Latin bronze tablet from 2200 years ago, is for Europeans.
astrobe_ 4y ago
Perhaps there is an analogy with how "western" words are formed. We usually use so mix of Greek and Latin roots, especially in science and engineering. For instance the word "telemetry". It has the "tele-" prefix one finds in "television" and the "meter" root, so you instantly know that it has something to do with measuring something from afar. I don't understand the "text length" argument. I can see it can be a problem - I avoid French translations of software because French is usually longer than English and it sometimes lead to text truncation or overflow bugs, but it's no big deal, really. Besides, it seems to me that Korea's Hangul shows that compromises are possible. It's amusing to read in Wikipedia that "Hangul was created in 1443 CE by King Sejong the Great in an attempt to increase literacy [...] As a result, Hangul was initially denounced and disparaged by the Korean educated class" [1]. This sort of reinforces my impression that the Japanese writing was made to be pedantic rather than practical. We had that in the west until public schools were built: reading and writing was only accessible to wealthy families that could afford hiring a teacher and had a lot of free time. There's a sort of urban legend that public schools did some compromises too; the long summer break was supposedly created so that children of farmers could help with harvesting. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul
- bluepizza 4y ago
  > I don't understand the "text length" argument. Japanese has barely any punctuation, and relies on non-kanji particles to set rhythm. A sentence without kanji is essentially an endless single word. Dropping kanji and replacing it with either latin or hiragana would mean starting to use spaces and commas, which are not commonly used today.

by bojo 4y ago

dougmwne 4y ago

Homophones don’t seems like they would be a problem intuitively. If a homophone can exist in the spoken language and retain meaning, then it would be able to exist in the written language too without a loss of meaning.

bojo 4y ago
To your point I came across this a moment ago: https://selftaughtjapanese.com/2014/03/19/research-results-homophones-in-japanese/ https://selftaughtjapanese.com/2014/03/19/research-results-h... While there are a ridiculous amount of homophones (top 3 are 45, 38, 31!), it does look like the total number of words that include them is at 3.4%, increasing outside of daily language as you step into more specific topics. Not exactly small, but not as dramatic as I had pictured either. English apparently has 7-15% depending on what you reference by comparison. The biggest difference is that while they are individual words in English, they are only word components in Japanese, which is why I'd say it's arguably harder. Not impossible of course, children are taught with spaced out hiragana at first, eventually learning the more compact non-spaced version of the language as they incorporate more kanji to help with word boundaries.
bluepizza 4y ago
I think "kou" has more than 30 meanings, which is maddening even while speaking. But the in person context is not the same as written context. There are several elements of context, such place, people, situation, which are obvious to parse in a spoken conversation, but would have to be introduced when writing.

adrian_b 4y ago

The ridiculous amount of homophones is due to what I consider as a big mistake, the Japanese did not only import the Chinese writing, but they also imported the Chinese readings of the Chinese symbols. The import of the Chinese readings has created some homophones between Chinese words and native Japanese words and also many times more homophones between distinct Chinese words that had different pronunciation in Chinese, but which are pronounced identically by the Japanese. Spoken Japanese has a higher proportion of native Japanese words, but written Japanese has frequently much more words that are derived from mispronounced Chinese words than native Japanese words. Scientific and technical literature has an overwhelming proportion of words derived from Chinese, because it contains a large proportion of compound words. Most compound words in Japanese use the Chinese pronunciation of the signs, because the native Japanese words are usually longer. Had the Japanese always used the Chinese signs only with the native Japanese readings, there would have been no ambiguities due to homophones and it would have also been easy to transition to any other writing system, if they would have ever wanted that. As it is now, it is unlikely that the Japanese writing system could ever be simplified. The argument that changing the current Japanese writing system would disconnect the people from their cultural heritage, is much less valid than it would seem, as I have discovered when attempting to read some books written before the first World War. Even if the simplifications in Japanese have been far less than in the transition from Traditional Chinese writing to Simplified Chinese writing, nevertheless in modern Japanese there are a large number of kanji that have been modified from their versions used one hundred years ago. Also many hiragana/katakana spellings have been modified, to reflect modern Japanese pronunciation. So for reading Japanese writings with an age of more than one century, you need to learn much more than for reading modern Japanese, and that is true also for the native Japanese people. Reading old Japanese books is far more difficult for Japanese people, than reading a book published in 1500 AD, or a Latin bronze tablet from 2200 years ago, is for Europeans.

astrobe_ 4y ago

Perhaps there is an analogy with how "western" words are formed. We usually use so mix of Greek and Latin roots, especially in science and engineering. For instance the word "telemetry". It has the "tele-" prefix one finds in "television" and the "meter" root, so you instantly know that it has something to do with measuring something from afar. I don't understand the "text length" argument. I can see it can be a problem - I avoid French translations of software because French is usually longer than English and it sometimes lead to text truncation or overflow bugs, but it's no big deal, really. Besides, it seems to me that Korea's Hangul shows that compromises are possible. It's amusing to read in Wikipedia that "Hangul was created in 1443 CE by King Sejong the Great in an attempt to increase literacy [...] As a result, Hangul was initially denounced and disparaged by the Korean educated class" [1]. This sort of reinforces my impression that the Japanese writing was made to be pedantic rather than practical. We had that in the west until public schools were built: reading and writing was only accessible to wealthy families that could afford hiring a teacher and had a lot of free time. There's a sort of urban legend that public schools did some compromises too; the long summer break was supposedly created so that children of farmers could help with harvesting. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

bluepizza 4y ago
> I don't understand the "text length" argument. Japanese has barely any punctuation, and relies on non-kanji particles to set rhythm. A sentence without kanji is essentially an endless single word. Dropping kanji and replacing it with either latin or hiragana would mean starting to use spaces and commas, which are not commonly used today.