7 ms·

Interesting and well-illustrated article. The claim that Japanese (or any other language) totally unique is a romantic one, showing the ignorance of the author

• bradrn 2y ago
  > the effect go writing system on language is not covered a lot in Linguistics, whose focus is the spoken language I’d frame this a little differently: the vast majority of languages in the world are not regularly written, so linguists must focus on the spoken language. For languages which are written more often, linguists can and do focus on the relationship between the written and the spoken language.
  • keiferski 2y ago
    Philology tends to be more focused on texts than spoken languages, too.
  • Jun8 2y ago
    That's correct. A fascinating topic is how the written representation shapes the user's language, and, by association, their thinking - a written word version of teh Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis if you will. For example, for the aliens in the (story and) movie Arrival, was their superior all-temporal thinking capability due to their language, or their interesting written form? Interesting personal anecdote: My son is learning French in school, he's native in both English and Turkish, but not very good with Turkish spelling and does not use it often. I've seen him struggle with memorizing French words and their pronunciation, because he doesn't have an alternative phonetic representation of them (he doesn't know IPA, naturally :-). But Turkish spelling is (almost 100%) phonetic and I remembered that's how I memorized English when I was kid, I would think about their pronunciation in Turkish! E.g. cheese would be "çiyz".
  • aragonite 2y ago
    There's an case that can be made that "written language" is somewhat of a misnomer and that spoken language is to "written language" somewhat as music is to sheet music (or as chess is to chess notation), and so spoken language alone belongs to the proper subject matter of lingusitics. E.g. Saussure: > A language and its written form constitute two separate systems of signs. The sole reason for the existence of the latter is to represent the former. The object of study in linguistics is not a combination of the written word and the spoken word. The spoken word alone constitutes that object. But the written word is so intimately connected with the spoken word it represents that it manages to usurp the principal role. As much or even more importance is given to this representation of the vocal sign as to the vocal sign itself. Edit: Apparently there's a term for this view: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonocentrism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonocentrism
• fenomas 2y ago
  > they mention furigana, characters that aid in reading Kanji characters ... There are many examples of similar use TFA's main point about uniqueness with furigana was how it's occasionally used for out-of-band communication, like an author having a character say one thing while conveying to the reader that they mean something else. Do other languages have similar features?
  • brabel 2y ago
    That felt to me to play the same role as "local footnotes" (those footnotes that sometimes appear not at the end of the page, but at the end of a short section or paragraph)?!
    • fenomas 2y ago
      The nuance is a bit different. With what TFA is talking about with furigana, the implication is that whoever is speaking has said one word but pronounced it like another. That doesn't really make sense in English but with JP and kanji having lots of readings it's kind of a normal way to think. So in some cases it's really no different from a footnote - e.g. in the JP version of Neuromancer there are bits where dialogue has the word for "immerse" with the furigana "jack in", and the effect is that the character has said the in-universe slang, and the base word is giving the reader a sense for what the slang means. But if a character says "She's my friend" and "friend" has the furigana for "lover", or vice-versa, the effect becomes very different. You can think of it as one word being in the speaker's mind and another coming out of their mouth, or maybe as the character saying one thing and the author telling us another. I'm not a native speaker, just fluent, but anyway that's how it works in my mind.
    • wodenokoto 2y ago
      I think they are completely different. I think the way the author calls it "reading in stereo" is a very good picture. It's not a footnote or a liner note that explains the meaning of a word. Those live outside the text. It _is_ the word and it lives within the text. It's the inherent meaning of the characters painted on to another word.
  • 2y ago
• PaulHoule 2y ago
  I definitely found Chinese was much easier to learn to read at a minimal level. Since the sounds per character are 1-1 and the semantics are very clean you can get a lot out of a text by looking characters up in the Unihan database. Words are usually composed out of the semantics of the characters and the grammar is pretty regular, more than some artificial languages.
  • canjobear 2y ago
    > Since the sounds per character are 1-1 and the semantics are very clean you can get a lot out of a text by looking characters up in the Unihan database. You probably got a lot of wrong meanings this way. The characters aren't 1-1 mapped to sounds and their semantics are profoundly context-dependent.
    • kfk34k 2y ago
      The characters are mostly 1-1. There are a few exceptions, but usually one is a lot more typical than the other, so reading it with the typical reading won't usually get you in trouble
      • gtranger 2y ago
        While not as egregious as Japanese where characters can have 15+ readings, the number of exceptions certainly are not few. Below is a link to the official table of words with multiple pronunciations in standard Mandarin. https://zh.m.wikisource.org/wiki/%E6%99%AE%E9%80%9A%E8%AF%9D%E5%BC%82%E8%AF%BB%E8%AF%8D%E5%AE%A1%E9%9F%B3%E8%A1%A8%EF%BC%88%E4%BF%AE%E8%AE%A2%E7%A8%BF%EF%BC%89 https://zh.m.wikisource.org/wiki/%E6%99%AE%E9%80%9A%E8%AF%9D...
        • Asraelite 2y ago
          872 in that list. It would be interesting to see how many of those exceptions are actually common and relevant to everyday speech. But yeah, even taking that into account, Japanese is a trainwreck compared to Chinese.
• gwervc 2y ago
  Yes, author of the article obviously never tried to learn Sumerian, because the Japanese written system is quite regular and easy to deal with in comparison.
  • adrian_b 2y ago
    While the Sumerian writing system presents some of the same difficulties of the Japanese writing system, like many signs that have multiple possible readings and a combination of semantic signs and phonetic signs, the total number of signs and the number of possible readings for them are far greater in Japanese, so the Sumerian writing system is easier and more regular than the Japanese writing system. The main difficulties of the Sumerian writing system are due to the fact that many of its rules had to be guessed, e.g. about where to use certain readings for some signs, depending on their context, because the last people who knew the complete system have died millennia ago, and such guesses are seldom completely certain. In the comparison with Sumerian, Japanese is aided by the existence of native speakers who can always show the correct reading and meaning of a text (though many young Japanese can have great difficulties in reading any book published before WWII, because the writing reform has made drastic changes, replacing both many kanji signs and the furigana used for many kanji signs, so even where furigana are written they may not help enough a modern reader). However, while the availability of native speakers eliminates the problems caused by not knowing the correct rules, that still does not make the Japanese writing system simpler than the Sumerian writing system.
• dduugg 2y ago
  > "Dissociation from Birth" section sounds interesting until you learn that all alphabetic systems arose from a similar process, e.g. aleph was a drawing of an ox's head, etc. My understanding of Korean (Hangul) is that the alphabet design is based on the shape of mouth in articulation, sonics, category, etc. of the letters themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Letter_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Letter_design This is known generally as "featural writing system": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Featural_writing_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Featural_writing_system
  • yencabulator 2y ago
    Hangul is an exception to many similar "historically true" patterns mostly because it was created so late. Hangul is more a single person's well-educated effort, not something that emerged over time from various local customs. The castle I grew up near is easily 150+ years older than Hangul.
• canjobear 2y ago
  Chinese also has furigana-like characters that can be written next to characters, bopomofo or zhuyin fuhao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo, although only taught and used in Taiwan as far as I know.
  • refactor_master 2y ago
    In fact, in Taiwan you’re more likely to see Japanese in the wild than bopomofo.
    • makeset 2y ago
      As a tourist, maybe. Bopomofo (aka. zhuyin) is universal in all children's books until 3rd-4th grade, and is the most common keyboard input system used in Taiwan.
• adrian_b 2y ago
  While, as you say, there have been and there still are other writing systems that mix semantic elements with phonetic elements, or in which what is written does not determine completely the intended pronunciation (like in the systems that write only the consonants), there has been no other dead or alive writing system where these features are so extreme, causing a complexity and ambiguity even remotely comparable with the Japanese writing system. There is nothing romantic about this. Apart from its writing system, the language itself would not be unusual at all, except for being a mixed language, especially in the technical and scientific styles, with a huge amount of words of Chinese origin that behave very differently from the native words, which is also a consequence of the writing system, through which these words had been imported.
• Chathamization 2y ago
  > Their use is similar to radicals in Mandarin, which is to provide additional semantic clarification. Radicals are used in the same way for Hanzi (Chinese/"Mandarin") and Kanji (Japanese). Most of the Japanese characters are the same as the unsimplified Chinese characters. Furigana is used in a fairly different way, though. You occasionally see phonetic writing similar to furigana underneath characters in books that are used to teach children how to read. But it’s not nearly as common as in Japan, and it’s only (from what I’ve seen) used as a study aid for kids, not in the more creative ways the author discusses here. The big difference as well is that the phonetic writing in Chinese isn’t part of the language itself. It’s like IPA (the dictionary pronunciation symbols) - they’re used to tell you how to write something, not to actually communicate. Kana (which furigana is written in), is actually part of the Japanese language.
  • adrian_b 2y ago
    Furigana are frequent in many technical and scientific texts, not only in children books, because such texts may include many words that would not be used in normal conversations. This was already true for the books published before WWII, i.e. before the writing reform, even if those books contained much less hiragana than the modern texts (after the writing reform a lot of hiragana word terminations began to be written in order to disambiguate the readings of kanji for which native Japanese readings are chosen, even when the complete furigana are not provided; this post-WWII writing style may reduce the need for furigana).
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• rvba 2y ago
  I could easily write a wall of text about Polish honorifics, that can easily be used to express all the honorifics mentioned in the Wikipedia article, and much much more. But probably nobody's really interested. I mean, there are even ways how a bum refers to you, when they ask you for spare change.