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People find value in the tradition of writing. If Japanese were to ditch kanji as Korea did, I think there would be some complaints.

WillAdams 2y ago
Hanja still get used in some contexts --- had to memorize ~500 of them when I was studying Korean.
- iforgotpassword 2y ago
  AFAIK (maybe someone can correct or confirm) it is essential for studying law in Korea. To avoid ambiguity with identically sounding words, Chinese characters are used in law.
  - pas 2y ago
    It seems there's room for "legal innovation" there, by providing definitions early on in various texts to disambiguate, and then sticking to them throughout the text!? I assume it's already done anyway for some terms. Why isn't this more widespread?
    - mannykannot 2y ago
      Innovation is quite often resisted by those who have mastered the hard way of doing things, though I have no idea whether this is the case here.
    - fenomas 2y ago
      I suppose for the same reason that law in English-speaking countries still uses so much Latin?
      - hollerith 2y ago
        The Latin (and Old French) words don't require a complicated arrangement to type them on a keyboard.
        Tor3 2y ago
        For what it's worth, writing Japanese on a normal keyboard is easy, even for me. Fast too. And my wife is super-fast. I have no knowledge of how this is done in Chinese, or Korean for that matter (not to mention other non-Latin languages like Arabic, Thai or Hebrew), but for Japanese it's easy. There are two main ways of doing it, some prefer one, some the other.
      - pas 2y ago
        But that's the opposite of innovation? Basically, instead of describing things in detail drafters opt to use shortcuts, but that's how people end up getting fucked in court by some "technicality". Innovation would be to just put in the verbiage, precisely define terms, fuck tradition.
  - coliveira 2y ago
    This is the reason Chinese characters are not going away. It is essential to comprehending written documents, because the Chinese language (and similars) have too many sounds that are the same or very similar for different words. So, if they abolish the characters and use something purely phonetic they'll have to reinvent the whole language to be understandable, especially for anything that is not colloquial.
    - jimmaswell 2y ago
      > they'll have to reinvent the whole language to be understandable Frankly, the whole language seems like such a mess that maybe they should?
      - coliveira 2y ago
        Good luck convincing 1.5 billion people that they need to reinvent a language they have used for thousands of years in order to satisfy somebody else...
        James_K 2y ago
        In the Chinese style of government, people don't necessarily need to be convinced of something for it to be implemented.
    - James_K 2y ago
      This is not a problem in other languages. The word "set" in English has 7 different meanings, yet you rarely struggle to tell which is intended. If the language can be understood when spoken, it can be understood when written phonetically.
      - coliveira 2y ago
        Other languages are not Chinese. In Chinese a lot of the meaning in the spoken language is conveyed through tones and other conversational cues.
jerf 2y ago
People love to complain about how much work other people can do in order to slightly convenience themselves. And the media loves to run air their complaints, because they are snappy, and photogenic, and easy to pitch as "feel good stories about how much I care for the old ways unlike those lazy sloppy people over there"... even if "I" also find myself forgetting how to write kanji. It doesn't matter. It won't be a top-down decision. It'll just be a long, slow progression of people slowly realizing that writing in kanji for this character is annoying, so maybe I'll just write it phonetically, and then that character, and then there will be a year or two where there's a phase change and suddenly it's everywhere, even though nobody decided. And people will complain and whine and moan about the "beauty" of the kanji disappearing. And even though they have a point, it won't matter because the kanji will still be there as much as they ever were, and all one has to do is go study them... but they won't. Because complaining about how other people should keep doing something hard is easy, but actually doing the hard thing yourself is hard, and the vast, vast majority of the complainers won't actually do anything about it other than complain, but take the easier options themselves, just maybe a year or two later than others. I have no beef with the people taking the easier option. Life is full of things to spend effort on and we can't give maximum effort to all of them. I am annoyed at people who complain about how other people can do vast, vast quantities of work so they can briefly feel slightly better about themselves in some way.
- James_K 2y ago
  You'd be surprised how much staying power these things have. The nation and its language are two concepts inherently intertwined. Take the case of Welsh in Wales. It was an almost dead language that no one spoke, but as soon as the Welsh got the ability to self-govern, they enacted laws to mandate all documents and road signs were available in Welsh, required it to be taught in schools, etc. It's very difficult to kill a language in a democratic state because it's a very bad look to oppose laws that "protect the nation's culture". The people who want these things are endlessly pandered to as a result.
  - jcranmer 2y ago
    Welsh is generally highlighted as the example of a successful language revitalism movement, but it's also one of the rare examples of such movements succeeding. By contrast, you can look at Irish--where the need for the language that wasn't English was seen as absolutely essential as part of the (successful) revolution and independence movement--and see that the language revitalism there is more or less a failure. A century after independence, the number of L1 speakers of Irish has gone down, and I believe the Irish government still conducts most of its business using English (despite English officially being the lesser of the official languages) since so few members of government are sufficiently proficient in Irish.
nialv7 2y ago
Yeah, because Japanese without Kanji is at least 2x harder to read.
int_19h 2y ago
Sure, and there were complaints in Korea, too. Lest we forget, Hangul was developed in 15th century, and was promptly condemned by the educated elites while being enthusiastically adopted by the underclasses. But the elite pushback, going as far as outright bans in some periods, meant that it wouldn't become the standard orthography until 1900s. I don't think anyone today would seriously argue that Hanja is preferable, though. In retrospect, it's clear that the benefits of easily accessible universal literacy are too substantial to ignore for the sake of tradition.
- smallnamespace 2y ago
  > I don't think anyone today would seriously argue that Hanja is preferable It's necessary to use Hanja today in educated contexts because Hangul has too many homophones, and most educated (technical, literary, scientific) vocabulary has a Sinitic origin and therefore are more homophonic than typical Korean words.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    Sure, and lawyers in English-speaking countries similarly use Latin and Old French jargon to reduce ambiguity. But this is a fairly narrow use case that is really more of a specialized notation - it's not used day-to-day even by people who regularly use Hanja professionally.

WillAdams 2y ago

Hanja still get used in some contexts --- had to memorize ~500 of them when I was studying Korean.

iforgotpassword 2y ago
AFAIK (maybe someone can correct or confirm) it is essential for studying law in Korea. To avoid ambiguity with identically sounding words, Chinese characters are used in law.
- pas 2y ago
  It seems there's room for "legal innovation" there, by providing definitions early on in various texts to disambiguate, and then sticking to them throughout the text!? I assume it's already done anyway for some terms. Why isn't this more widespread?
  - mannykannot 2y ago
    Innovation is quite often resisted by those who have mastered the hard way of doing things, though I have no idea whether this is the case here.
  - fenomas 2y ago
    I suppose for the same reason that law in English-speaking countries still uses so much Latin?
    - hollerith 2y ago
      The Latin (and Old French) words don't require a complicated arrangement to type them on a keyboard.
      - Tor3 2y ago
        For what it's worth, writing Japanese on a normal keyboard is easy, even for me. Fast too. And my wife is super-fast. I have no knowledge of how this is done in Chinese, or Korean for that matter (not to mention other non-Latin languages like Arabic, Thai or Hebrew), but for Japanese it's easy. There are two main ways of doing it, some prefer one, some the other.
    - pas 2y ago
      But that's the opposite of innovation? Basically, instead of describing things in detail drafters opt to use shortcuts, but that's how people end up getting fucked in court by some "technicality". Innovation would be to just put in the verbiage, precisely define terms, fuck tradition.
- coliveira 2y ago
  This is the reason Chinese characters are not going away. It is essential to comprehending written documents, because the Chinese language (and similars) have too many sounds that are the same or very similar for different words. So, if they abolish the characters and use something purely phonetic they'll have to reinvent the whole language to be understandable, especially for anything that is not colloquial.
  - jimmaswell 2y ago
    > they'll have to reinvent the whole language to be understandable Frankly, the whole language seems like such a mess that maybe they should?
    - coliveira 2y ago
      Good luck convincing 1.5 billion people that they need to reinvent a language they have used for thousands of years in order to satisfy somebody else...
      - James_K 2y ago
        In the Chinese style of government, people don't necessarily need to be convinced of something for it to be implemented.
  - James_K 2y ago
    This is not a problem in other languages. The word "set" in English has 7 different meanings, yet you rarely struggle to tell which is intended. If the language can be understood when spoken, it can be understood when written phonetically.
    - coliveira 2y ago
      Other languages are not Chinese. In Chinese a lot of the meaning in the spoken language is conveyed through tones and other conversational cues.

jerf 2y ago

People love to complain about how much work other people can do in order to slightly convenience themselves. And the media loves to run air their complaints, because they are snappy, and photogenic, and easy to pitch as "feel good stories about how much I care for the old ways unlike those lazy sloppy people over there"... even if "I" also find myself forgetting how to write kanji. It doesn't matter. It won't be a top-down decision. It'll just be a long, slow progression of people slowly realizing that writing in kanji for this character is annoying, so maybe I'll just write it phonetically, and then that character, and then there will be a year or two where there's a phase change and suddenly it's everywhere, even though nobody decided. And people will complain and whine and moan about the "beauty" of the kanji disappearing. And even though they have a point, it won't matter because the kanji will still be there as much as they ever were, and all one has to do is go study them... but they won't. Because complaining about how other people should keep doing something hard is easy, but actually doing the hard thing yourself is hard, and the vast, vast majority of the complainers won't actually do anything about it other than complain, but take the easier options themselves, just maybe a year or two later than others. I have no beef with the people taking the easier option. Life is full of things to spend effort on and we can't give maximum effort to all of them. I am annoyed at people who complain about how other people can do vast, vast quantities of work so they can briefly feel slightly better about themselves in some way.

James_K 2y ago
You'd be surprised how much staying power these things have. The nation and its language are two concepts inherently intertwined. Take the case of Welsh in Wales. It was an almost dead language that no one spoke, but as soon as the Welsh got the ability to self-govern, they enacted laws to mandate all documents and road signs were available in Welsh, required it to be taught in schools, etc. It's very difficult to kill a language in a democratic state because it's a very bad look to oppose laws that "protect the nation's culture". The people who want these things are endlessly pandered to as a result.
- jcranmer 2y ago
  Welsh is generally highlighted as the example of a successful language revitalism movement, but it's also one of the rare examples of such movements succeeding. By contrast, you can look at Irish--where the need for the language that wasn't English was seen as absolutely essential as part of the (successful) revolution and independence movement--and see that the language revitalism there is more or less a failure. A century after independence, the number of L1 speakers of Irish has gone down, and I believe the Irish government still conducts most of its business using English (despite English officially being the lesser of the official languages) since so few members of government are sufficiently proficient in Irish.

nialv7 2y ago

Yeah, because Japanese without Kanji is at least 2x harder to read.

int_19h 2y ago

Sure, and there were complaints in Korea, too. Lest we forget, Hangul was developed in 15th century, and was promptly condemned by the educated elites while being enthusiastically adopted by the underclasses. But the elite pushback, going as far as outright bans in some periods, meant that it wouldn't become the standard orthography until 1900s. I don't think anyone today would seriously argue that Hanja is preferable, though. In retrospect, it's clear that the benefits of easily accessible universal literacy are too substantial to ignore for the sake of tradition.

smallnamespace 2y ago
> I don't think anyone today would seriously argue that Hanja is preferable It's necessary to use Hanja today in educated contexts because Hangul has too many homophones, and most educated (technical, literary, scientific) vocabulary has a Sinitic origin and therefore are more homophonic than typical Korean words.
- int_19h 2y ago
  Sure, and lawyers in English-speaking countries similarly use Latin and Old French jargon to reduce ambiguity. But this is a fairly narrow use case that is really more of a specialized notation - it's not used day-to-day even by people who regularly use Hanja professionally.