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 ins

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