7 ms·

A system fails when its natives don't know how to use it. So time to sunset the system, surely? I don't know why so many countries are so obstinately hanging o

by bapak 1y ago

A system fails when its natives don't know how to use it. So time to sunset the system, surely? I don't know why so many countries are so obstinately hanging onto something so difficult. Do it like Korea if you don't want to go the Vietnamese way.

kusokurae 1y ago
long reply here bc this is a Special Interest of mine. I'm going to put aside the "so difficult" thing here mostly, because the perceived difficulty is partly modern teaching practices not updating beyond "just write the kanji 100000 times ok" (this is a failure of people, not the writing system), and people actively choosing to not write anything at all, which isn't necessarily a problem because nowadays recognition is more important, and I don't see people panicing about how many people don't know how to spell many english words anymore. Alternatives would be nightmarish and culturally destructive to implement in the modern day. Further, people confuse poor implementation with complexity being the cause of the problem. Taiwan and HK both have high literacy rates despite using traditional characters, yet simplified characters were apparently necessary to increase literacy? It doesn't compute. Just under 50% of Japanese words are loanwords from Chinese. Recognising characters allows a ton of written nuance and extra vocabulary which the Japanese take full advantage of. There's at least 10 separate words for "kou kai". Even when not fully-remembered, Kanji allow mental mapping of multiple homophones without issue. We're really talking about a vocabulary mass exctinction event. Back in the ancient times Korea didn't have such a wide-ranging and culturally-mixed set of words as now. If the Japanese do this it'll be cutting off the vast majority of their cultural history. Seems unideal considering the butchering the French did, did exactly that to Vietnam's literary culture and basically cut the people off from much of it. Chinese doing this would be insane. Mao was tempted to use roman characters instead of the simplification they rolled out, which from a system design perspective only made a worse and more difficult/confusing system with more exceptions to rules than before, and poorer phonosemantic consistency/relations with other characters. Further because as research has proven many times over, it's harder to recognise many excessively simple & similar characters compared to more unique and specific forms. Thankfully Stalin advised him against it. We really are talking about doing something similar to a total spelling reform of english and just throwing the last 1000 years of literature, written records etc away. Only in the case of especially Chinese, you're throwing away a system that was developed and specifically tailored to the languages using it, which have due to its relative robustness to change as compared with latin letters, led to writing surviving many many difficult periods, regime changes, wars, famines etc over 3000 years. If you've ever compared Beowulf with Gawain, with Shakespeare and then modern English, you'll understand what a total overhaul a language can undergo if unchecked -- Chinese characters have enabled a comparatively stable orthography. Less than 800 years and it becomes gibberish.
- bapak 1y ago
  > many people don't know how to spell many english words anymore. Yes but that's not really comparable. You can misspell "litrally" but how close can you get if you can't remember any stroke of the glyph? There's an inherent advantage in spelling words closely to how they sound. I'm not saying English is great at this either, but I can still write "Kernel Sanders" and you know what it means, without using a whole other writing system as fallback (pinyin)
  - kusokurae 1y ago
    Hey! So in the vast majority of cases, what you're describing for english is more or less the same for these languages -- when I forget a real bastard of a character (usually a less complex one similar to many others), I can sort of mentally picture the shape, but not quite. I get a flash of the shape in my mind, but then it's gone, and I'm in a half-position where I know parts of it, maybe I know it has 广 and something like 多 inside there somewhere (this is purely academic, I'm not referencing a real character here), but I don't know the exact order. Quite often this is where the art of bodging it, scribbling it, or using a variant character comes in handy. Also, for more fun, Chinese and even rarely Japanese will sometimes use a different character sharing the same pronunciation from a set of characters typically used for just phonetic pronunciation, in the place of the one they've forgotten.
jack1243star 1y ago
> A system fails when its natives don't know how to use it. They definitely do, it's just that hand writing has become a more niche use case in modern society (regardless of the language). If you removed all kanji in a block of Japanese text (replaced with kana), I'd expect at least a 50% reduction in reading speed for natives, and some errors in comprehension. They're fundamental to the language.
- latentsea 1y ago
  You wouldn't expect the same 50% reduction if the natives had been educated under that paradigm and suitable adjustments made to the system like adding spaces etc to accommodate it.
hintymad 1y ago
Are you sure? If anything, spelling along makes it hard to read Chinese or Japanese. Examples: can Japanese people correctly understand this: “かんじをせんねんいじょうつかっていたけいいからかんじをはいしするとぶんしょうによるいしのそつうにへいがいがしょうじるからです”？ In fact, the following two different sentences both have the same above kana：「監事を専念異常浸かっていた敬意から監事を配しする飛ぶん商による石の疎通に兵が意を招じる空です。」「漢字を千年以上使っていた経緯から漢字を廃止すると文章による意思の疎通に弊害が生じるからです。 Or how about くさくさくさくらくらくさくさくさくさくさくさくらさくさんさくさんくさくさくらんくらくら？ Or how about こうないしゃせい？Is it 校内写生 or 口内射精? In all seriousness, even Koreans still debate whether they should continue to use some Chinese characters, and they do so in poems and literatures. For instance, 악유원 means shit, yet 乐游原 has layers of meanings. Chinese and Japanese have too many homephones to use a spelling system like Korean. Unlike Chinese, where individual characters correspond closely to morphemes and carry distinct meanings, Japanese is organized around words as the fundamental linguistic units. Furthermore, because Japanese employs a pitch-accent system rather than the kind of lexical tones found in Chinese, writing some native Japanese words (和語) entirely in kana typically does not create confusion. Also, Japan had at least three major attempts to remove Kanji. First time: The Tale of Genji, the world’s first novel, was written by a woman entirely in kana, with only a small number of Buddhist terms in kanji—terms which, in theory, could also have been rendered in katakana. This demonstrated that early Japanese could be expressed systematically and fully without using any Chinese characters at all. Nevertheless, the Japanese chose to retain kanji. Second time: During the Meiji Restoration, slogans such as “Abolish kanji, or East Asia will never grow strong” were popular. In the end, Japan found that it could modernize, prosper, and even become one of the five permanent members of the League of Nations while still keeping kanji. The decision was made to continue using them. Third time: After World War II, General MacArthur commissioned a team of American education specialists to work with Japanese experts to discuss whether to abolish kanji entirely, and to consider the possibility of fully romanizing the Japanese language. Yet, they decided to keep Japanese.
- svara 1y ago
  I don't find the argument about homophones very convincing, since people do speak to each other and it works. People will surely be able to adapt. But, you're basically throwing away the country's history. In just a few years young people wouldn't be able to read any older text anymore. I can see why you wouldn't want that.
otabdeveloper4 1y ago
How many Americans can write cursive? I think it's time to abandon the Latin alphabet. It's too inefficient.
- mastermage 1y ago
  Is cursive a requirement to write the English language correctly?
  - otabdeveloper4 1y ago
    Yes. (Also, define "correctly".)
    - mastermage 1y ago
      Grammaticaly and Semantically.
codedokode 1y ago
That reads as a foreigner suggesting to abandon many thousands years long history and culture just because the characters are too difficult for him. It doesn't even make sense because today we have computers and ML. If you want to write something, you just type the spelling, and the program automatically converts it into proper characters. And if you don't understand the character, AI can translate it for you. I am sure this can be integrated into electronic glasses.
- coffeeling 1y ago
  Japan has had pro-romanization societies since the 1920's, and even during the last attempt at large-scale script reform after the war, it wasn't just the Americans pushing it: Many Japanese were enthusiastic about moving to a phonetic script because they perceived it as more efficient and modern. Likewise, not every American administrator was in favour of reforming away the kanji, far from it. J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan is a good treatise on the subject. EDIT: Also, this was published in 1877 if I did my date conversions right: https://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko17/bunko17_d0035/bunko17_d0035.html https://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko17/bunko17_d0035...
- bapak 1y ago
  I gave you an example: they can't write it. I also gave you two examples of cultures who already did it: Koreans did it autonomously, the Vietnamese did it during occupation. Both are successful today. But yes "preserve history" at the expensive of daily life. I'm sure you speak Latin too, plenty of history lost there.
anigbrowl 1y ago
This is a common misconception until you study the language seriously. Japanese nominally has only 50 sounds, known as mora. In practice there are more because people smush them together, but this tends to be for very common words or dialectical variations by region. There are also spoken pitch markers, but they don't have any written indicia. Because there is such a small number of basic sounds, homophony (words with the same pronunciation but different meanings) is absolutely rampant. This is not too big of a problem when speaking because the context is usually obvious, but writing anything abstract using phonetic script alone will quickly become problematic. It's also tedious to read long texts in phonetic script in the same way that it's tedious to read lots of upper case text in the Latin alphabet. Another language feature is that Japanese compound words are often formed by just taking 1 or 2 more from several longer words. This would be like shortening 'American-Russian diplomacy' to 'amru diplomacy'. Very clear when written with specific characters, confusing if it is just phonetic. Then, word pronunciation changes within compounds, eg 川 kawa means river, but 山川 yamagawa is mountain river, and these changes are ubiquitous, probably 95% of words go through this phonetic alteration when folded into another word. It gets more complex again because there are so many particles, words that indicate grammatical inflection of some kind and can drastically change the meaning of a sentence if you use the wrong one. The most common ones are just a single mora and most others are just two. But there are lots of particles. 10-15 essential ones, ~30 that are used all the time, ~65 you need to know for fluency, and more that 150 you might come across in written form. I could go on and on. The basic reason for all this is that Japanese is fundamentally different from other languages because it developed on islands, and because the weather patterns around those islands made sailing in and out more difficult than islands in calmer latitudes separated by greater distances. They adopted Chinese characters because they didn't have a written language at the time they encountered them, then adapted those characters to develop the phonetic scripts. There's a huge amount of technical debt that would be impossible to unravel. Do it like Korea Korean has more different sounds, eg 14 consonant and 10 vowel sounds, vs ~10 consonant sounds and 5 vowel sounds in Japanese. You could also argue there was a higher level of literacy over a longer period, but that requires a lot of history and geography explanation to support - the point being that it would have been much harder to impose by imperial fiat unless it had been done much earlier.
BrtByte 1y ago
But at the same time, language and script are deeply tied to culture, identity, and history, so it's not as easy as just flipping a switch

by bapak 1y ago

kusokurae 1y ago

long reply here bc this is a Special Interest of mine. I'm going to put aside the "so difficult" thing here mostly, because the perceived difficulty is partly modern teaching practices not updating beyond "just write the kanji 100000 times ok" (this is a failure of people, not the writing system), and people actively choosing to not write anything at all, which isn't necessarily a problem because nowadays recognition is more important, and I don't see people panicing about how many people don't know how to spell many english words anymore. Alternatives would be nightmarish and culturally destructive to implement in the modern day. Further, people confuse poor implementation with complexity being the cause of the problem. Taiwan and HK both have high literacy rates despite using traditional characters, yet simplified characters were apparently necessary to increase literacy? It doesn't compute. Just under 50% of Japanese words are loanwords from Chinese. Recognising characters allows a ton of written nuance and extra vocabulary which the Japanese take full advantage of. There's at least 10 separate words for "kou kai". Even when not fully-remembered, Kanji allow mental mapping of multiple homophones without issue. We're really talking about a vocabulary mass exctinction event. Back in the ancient times Korea didn't have such a wide-ranging and culturally-mixed set of words as now. If the Japanese do this it'll be cutting off the vast majority of their cultural history. Seems unideal considering the butchering the French did, did exactly that to Vietnam's literary culture and basically cut the people off from much of it. Chinese doing this would be insane. Mao was tempted to use roman characters instead of the simplification they rolled out, which from a system design perspective only made a worse and more difficult/confusing system with more exceptions to rules than before, and poorer phonosemantic consistency/relations with other characters. Further because as research has proven many times over, it's harder to recognise many excessively simple & similar characters compared to more unique and specific forms. Thankfully Stalin advised him against it. We really are talking about doing something similar to a total spelling reform of english and just throwing the last 1000 years of literature, written records etc away. Only in the case of especially Chinese, you're throwing away a system that was developed and specifically tailored to the languages using it, which have due to its relative robustness to change as compared with latin letters, led to writing surviving many many difficult periods, regime changes, wars, famines etc over 3000 years. If you've ever compared Beowulf with Gawain, with Shakespeare and then modern English, you'll understand what a total overhaul a language can undergo if unchecked -- Chinese characters have enabled a comparatively stable orthography. Less than 800 years and it becomes gibberish.

bapak 1y ago
> many people don't know how to spell many english words anymore. Yes but that's not really comparable. You can misspell "litrally" but how close can you get if you can't remember any stroke of the glyph? There's an inherent advantage in spelling words closely to how they sound. I'm not saying English is great at this either, but I can still write "Kernel Sanders" and you know what it means, without using a whole other writing system as fallback (pinyin)
- kusokurae 1y ago
  Hey! So in the vast majority of cases, what you're describing for english is more or less the same for these languages -- when I forget a real bastard of a character (usually a less complex one similar to many others), I can sort of mentally picture the shape, but not quite. I get a flash of the shape in my mind, but then it's gone, and I'm in a half-position where I know parts of it, maybe I know it has 广 and something like 多 inside there somewhere (this is purely academic, I'm not referencing a real character here), but I don't know the exact order. Quite often this is where the art of bodging it, scribbling it, or using a variant character comes in handy. Also, for more fun, Chinese and even rarely Japanese will sometimes use a different character sharing the same pronunciation from a set of characters typically used for just phonetic pronunciation, in the place of the one they've forgotten.

jack1243star 1y ago

> A system fails when its natives don't know how to use it. They definitely do, it's just that hand writing has become a more niche use case in modern society (regardless of the language). If you removed all kanji in a block of Japanese text (replaced with kana), I'd expect at least a 50% reduction in reading speed for natives, and some errors in comprehension. They're fundamental to the language.

latentsea 1y ago
You wouldn't expect the same 50% reduction if the natives had been educated under that paradigm and suitable adjustments made to the system like adding spaces etc to accommodate it.

hintymad 1y ago

Are you sure? If anything, spelling along makes it hard to read Chinese or Japanese. Examples: can Japanese people correctly understand this: “かんじをせんねんいじょうつかっていたけいいからかんじをはいしするとぶんしょうによるいしのそつうにへいがいがしょうじるからです”？ In fact, the following two different sentences both have the same above kana：「監事を専念異常浸かっていた敬意から監事を配しする飛ぶん商による石の疎通に兵が意を招じる空です。」「漢字を千年以上使っていた経緯から漢字を廃止すると文章による意思の疎通に弊害が生じるからです。 Or how about くさくさくさくらくらくさくさくさくさくさくさくらさくさんさくさんくさくさくらんくらくら？ Or how about こうないしゃせい？Is it 校内写生 or 口内射精? In all seriousness, even Koreans still debate whether they should continue to use some Chinese characters, and they do so in poems and literatures. For instance, 악유원 means shit, yet 乐游原 has layers of meanings. Chinese and Japanese have too many homephones to use a spelling system like Korean. Unlike Chinese, where individual characters correspond closely to morphemes and carry distinct meanings, Japanese is organized around words as the fundamental linguistic units. Furthermore, because Japanese employs a pitch-accent system rather than the kind of lexical tones found in Chinese, writing some native Japanese words (和語) entirely in kana typically does not create confusion. Also, Japan had at least three major attempts to remove Kanji. First time: The Tale of Genji, the world’s first novel, was written by a woman entirely in kana, with only a small number of Buddhist terms in kanji—terms which, in theory, could also have been rendered in katakana. This demonstrated that early Japanese could be expressed systematically and fully without using any Chinese characters at all. Nevertheless, the Japanese chose to retain kanji. Second time: During the Meiji Restoration, slogans such as “Abolish kanji, or East Asia will never grow strong” were popular. In the end, Japan found that it could modernize, prosper, and even become one of the five permanent members of the League of Nations while still keeping kanji. The decision was made to continue using them. Third time: After World War II, General MacArthur commissioned a team of American education specialists to work with Japanese experts to discuss whether to abolish kanji entirely, and to consider the possibility of fully romanizing the Japanese language. Yet, they decided to keep Japanese.

svara 1y ago
I don't find the argument about homophones very convincing, since people do speak to each other and it works. People will surely be able to adapt. But, you're basically throwing away the country's history. In just a few years young people wouldn't be able to read any older text anymore. I can see why you wouldn't want that.

otabdeveloper4 1y ago

How many Americans can write cursive? I think it's time to abandon the Latin alphabet. It's too inefficient.

mastermage 1y ago
Is cursive a requirement to write the English language correctly?
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago
  Yes. (Also, define "correctly".)
  - mastermage 1y ago
    Grammaticaly and Semantically.

codedokode 1y ago

That reads as a foreigner suggesting to abandon many thousands years long history and culture just because the characters are too difficult for him. It doesn't even make sense because today we have computers and ML. If you want to write something, you just type the spelling, and the program automatically converts it into proper characters. And if you don't understand the character, AI can translate it for you. I am sure this can be integrated into electronic glasses.

coffeeling 1y ago
Japan has had pro-romanization societies since the 1920's, and even during the last attempt at large-scale script reform after the war, it wasn't just the Americans pushing it: Many Japanese were enthusiastic about moving to a phonetic script because they perceived it as more efficient and modern. Likewise, not every American administrator was in favour of reforming away the kanji, far from it. J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan is a good treatise on the subject. EDIT: Also, this was published in 1877 if I did my date conversions right: https://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko17/bunko17_d0035/bunko17_d0035.html https://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko17/bunko17_d0035...
bapak 1y ago
I gave you an example: they can't write it. I also gave you two examples of cultures who already did it: Koreans did it autonomously, the Vietnamese did it during occupation. Both are successful today. But yes "preserve history" at the expensive of daily life. I'm sure you speak Latin too, plenty of history lost there.

anigbrowl 1y ago

This is a common misconception until you study the language seriously. Japanese nominally has only 50 sounds, known as mora. In practice there are more because people smush them together, but this tends to be for very common words or dialectical variations by region. There are also spoken pitch markers, but they don't have any written indicia. Because there is such a small number of basic sounds, homophony (words with the same pronunciation but different meanings) is absolutely rampant. This is not too big of a problem when speaking because the context is usually obvious, but writing anything abstract using phonetic script alone will quickly become problematic. It's also tedious to read long texts in phonetic script in the same way that it's tedious to read lots of upper case text in the Latin alphabet. Another language feature is that Japanese compound words are often formed by just taking 1 or 2 more from several longer words. This would be like shortening 'American-Russian diplomacy' to 'amru diplomacy'. Very clear when written with specific characters, confusing if it is just phonetic. Then, word pronunciation changes within compounds, eg 川 kawa means river, but 山川 yamagawa is mountain river, and these changes are ubiquitous, probably 95% of words go through this phonetic alteration when folded into another word. It gets more complex again because there are so many particles, words that indicate grammatical inflection of some kind and can drastically change the meaning of a sentence if you use the wrong one. The most common ones are just a single mora and most others are just two. But there are lots of particles. 10-15 essential ones, ~30 that are used all the time, ~65 you need to know for fluency, and more that 150 you might come across in written form. I could go on and on. The basic reason for all this is that Japanese is fundamentally different from other languages because it developed on islands, and because the weather patterns around those islands made sailing in and out more difficult than islands in calmer latitudes separated by greater distances. They adopted Chinese characters because they didn't have a written language at the time they encountered them, then adapted those characters to develop the phonetic scripts. There's a huge amount of technical debt that would be impossible to unravel. Do it like Korea Korean has more different sounds, eg 14 consonant and 10 vowel sounds, vs ~10 consonant sounds and 5 vowel sounds in Japanese. You could also argue there was a higher level of literacy over a longer period, but that requires a lot of history and geography explanation to support - the point being that it would have been much harder to impose by imperial fiat unless it had been done much earlier.

BrtByte 1y ago

But at the same time, language and script are deeply tied to culture, identity, and history, so it's not as easy as just flipping a switch