5 ms·

What surprises me (only a little) is that Japan continues to use Chinese characters when they've got a perfectly good native syllabary.

by kps 21d ago

nrr 21d ago
I don't know if this is from the perspective of having learned Mandarin in elementary school first or if Japanese folks feel similarly, but reading words like, e.g., だいがくいんせい versus 大学院生 is actually a little more annoying because I have to scan more of the line to read the word in question. This is notwithstanding the effect that hiragana has in highlighting grammatical structures; it's a lot like setting off Finnish case endings and verb conjugations in a different color. At least, that's the reason why I prefer still having kanji around.
fenomas 21d ago
Japanese as it currently exists is just really hard to read when written without kanji. A couple reasons: it has TONS of homophones, and it doesn't use spaces, and also it has lots of common words that are only 1 or 2 characters long. So if you're parsing a stream of kana, in the general case there will be several different ways to interpret the next couple characters and you'll constantly be backtracking. So at a minimum, dropping kanji would mean the language needed to develop a system for where spaces go (which is less trivial than it sounds IMO). But also it would need to abandon a lot of homophones or find some way to disambiguate them. It could happen I guess, but I'm not sure how it could happen gradually.
- yongjik 21d ago
  Korean could serve as a point of comparison, as modern Korean is written mostly without Chinese characters (you could mix them in if you really want to, but approximately nobody bothers), but it does have spaces between words. And yes, when you have a highly inflecting language, "where do the spaces go" is a very nontrivial problem. It's a bit easier for Korean as it has far more available syllables (so fewer homonyms), but you could easily imagine these languages making different tradeoffs and ending up in different places.
  - fenomas 21d ago
    Agreed, I think that's a close analogy and it's wild to me how recently Korean dropped kanji. But I imagine having a lot more vowel sounds made it a lot easier. I've wondered whether the two interacted - e.g. if there were word pairs that had previously used the same vowel sounds, but changed after the switch to Hangul to be distinguishable. Do you know by any chance?
    - yongjik 21d ago
      Sino-Korean words are different from Sino-Japanese words in that the sounds are very "rigid": most Chinese characters have one canonical sound, and it is pronounced that way regardless of where it appears (modulo some mostly predictable sound change rules). So, you can't just take a Sino-Korean word and "tweak" its sound to disambiguate - when such a word changes its sound it will no longer be perceived as Sino-Korean at all, which actually happened for some examples such as 산행 (san-haeng, 山行, "mountain + go" = "hike on a mountain") which gave birth to 사냥 (sanyang, "hunting"), a separate word. What did happen was that we lost obscure words that could only be understood by looking at Chinese characters (because they're used so rarely, or because they sound the same as another more common word) - you could still use them if you wanted to, but unless you also write them in Hanja, it would be confusing, and if you mix gratuitous Hanja into your writing just because you like those words, most young readers will find it pretentious, and I fear, mostly unreadable. I can't say we lost much by losing these words. Rather, I think it actually forced writers to select less ambiguous words, which is usually a good thing. (Also, these days most Koreans know much more English than Classical Chinese, so English loanwords can sometimes fill the gap. It helps that most English (or other Western) loanwords sound different from native or Sino-Korean words, so there's less chance of collision.)
  - T-R 21d ago
    A lot of material for younger readers uses similar spacing to Korean, like the Pokemon games. It works well enough when you know the vocabulary being used is limited, but even there it gets frustrating. When you're reading, you're trying to identify a substring and map it back to the unit of meaning, which is effectively the kanji. That works seamlessly with Hangul, because it mostly blocks (as syllables) the same way as kanji, and, as you mentioned, the extra vowels and silent consonants provide more disambiguation. With kana, the length you have to scan to read, and then guess at (using only context to disambiguate), a root word, is a lot more arbitrary. Mechanically kana is just less compressed, less aligned, and makes it harder to visually identify/scan for units of meaning. Obviously Korean shows that you can make different tradeoffs, but for Japanese losing the kanji would probably necessitate reworking Kana as well - and unless the pronunciation changed, it would probably need to be in a way that represents the pitch accent, which is a modifier on the whole syllable, rather than just a few extra consonants or vowels.
- adrian_b 21d ago
  Japanese could be written with the Latin alphabet very well, if a set of kanji radicals were retained and inserted before a part of the words, to disambiguate their meaning. This is a not a new method of writing, but this is how writing was done in the past, for many millennia. The oldest writing systems, like the cuneiform and the Egyptian, also used, besides signs that indicated the pronunciation of a word, determinative signs, which indicated the semantic domain of the word, e.g. it is a name of a human profession, it is a name of an animal, it is a name of a tool made of metal, it is a geographic name, and so on. The determinative signs could be Chinese radicals to continue the tradition, or they could be a special set of emojis.
  - fenomas 21d ago
    Sure - it's probably safe to say that any language can he written in any writing system, if one is willing to change both the language and the writing system :)
  - inkyoto 20d ago
    > Japanese could be written with the Latin alphabet very well, if a set of kanji radicals were retained and inserted before a part of the words, to disambiguate their meaning. Sort of. The adoption of a Latin script would risk severing cultural continuity – a likely deal breaker in a society such as Japan, where history, tradition, and inherited form are not decorative artefacts but active components of cultural identity. Consider the following two Japanese surnames that – today – are spelled as Kanō and Gotō (I happen to have a close Japanese friend with this surname). They can be rendered as: Kanō: 狩野 and 加納 Gotō: 後藤 and 五島 Leaving the historical pronunciation aside, the issue that we have here is that each Kanji rendition represents a distinct lineage (or a medieval family/clan). The medieval 狩野氏[0] of Izu was an established warrior lineage. Its members occur in the Azuma Kagami, and the family was active by 1180. It belonged to a Fujiwara-derived lineage. 加納[1] is explicitly recorded with historical kana カナフ. A separate 加納氏 belonged to the Miura–Sawara grouping that divided control of Aizu after Yoritomo's Ōshū campaign. The official history of Kitakata lists 加納氏 separately amongst these medieval families. 後藤[2] The 後藤 lineage is attested in the twelfth century. 後藤基清, born in 1155, was the adopted son of 後藤実基 and served as a Kamakura-period warrior. 五島[3] This is the most interesting example as 五島 came from the unrelated medieval 宇久氏. The 宇久 had already been established by the Kamakura period and later controlled the Gotō islands. After Ukuji was promoted to Bunroku's service, he changed his surname from Uku to Gotō, and developed into the Gotō clan, a daimyo of the early-modern times. None of that historical lineage can be faithfully preserved through the use of a Latin script. The characters themselves carry continuity – visual (radicals), literary and civilisational – that transliteration can approximate only by discarding precisely what made the tradition contiguous in the first place and compressing them into a neutered phonetic contraption. Then there is the separate issue that Chinese characters, their readings and the vocabulary associated with them entered Japanese through several successive waves of cultural import, with one particularly important layer having been introduced during the Tang dynasty, when Japan extensively adopted Chinese literary, administrative and cultural models. Different readings, compounds and usages consequently preserve historical or cultural nuances associated with particular periods of Japanese contact with China. [0] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E7%8B%A9%E9%87%8E%E6%B0%8F-1155209 https://kotobank.jp/word/%E7%8B%A9%E9%87%8E%E6%B0%8F-1155209 [1] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%8A%A0%E7%B4%8D-45984 https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%8A%A0%E7%B4%8D-45984 [2] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%BE%8C%E8%97%A4%E5%9F%BA%E6%B8%85-1075291 https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%BE%8C%E8%97%A4%E5%9F%BA%E6%B8%8... [3] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%AE%87%E4%B9%85%E6%B0%8F-1148019 https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%AE%87%E4%B9%85%E6%B0%8F-1148019
- rf15 21d ago
  > it has TONS of homophones I never get this line of reasoning - so are people listening to spoken japanese just in a perpetual state of confusion because they can't see the associated intended Kanji? Also this coming from a person on a platform who's primary language is commonly pronounced with the last syllable/letter of each word used to start the next one. The engli shlanguage ha sit sown nonsense.
  - T-R 21d ago
    Spoken Japanese uses pitch accent to distinguish homophones
    - deleted 21d ago
      [deleted]
    - rf15 21d ago
      So shouldn't the better solution be a few more pronounciation markers beyond two strokes, a circle and tiny letters instead of thousands of chinese characters?
      - T-R 21d ago
        But who is this solution for? Unless you change the pronunciation of the language, it would be adding markers around whole syllables to disambiguate - syllables that represent the kanji they came from (many of which already have phoentic components) - but those syllables would still be less dense and visually identifiable than kanji is for someone who already speaks the language. It's similar to initialisms or emoji in English; it's of course frustrating for people who don't know them, and there are reasonable complaints about some of the extremes, but speakers/writers use them because they find them useful when communicating with an audience that's also assumed to know them.
    - fenomas 21d ago
      In some cases, but note that (a) this is only true for a tiny handful of homophones, and (b) the distinguishing accent varies by region. E.g. "hashi" famously can mean bridge/edge/chopsticks depending on accent, but which accent has which meaning is different in Tokyo vs Osaka.
johnwalkr 21d ago
Well the "native syllabary" is derived from Chinese characters, it's not something that was there and then Chinese characters were shoehorned in later. I think at some early point most Japanese learners (that don't already know a Chinese language) think kanji should be dropped. And at a later point I think most would change their mind as the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
kazinator 21d ago
Firstly, the native syllabary uses conventions that give rise to ambiguities. For instance えい (ei) can encode a long e sound like in "sensei" (teacher) or a separate e and i, like in "deiriguchi" (combined exit and entrance). Secondly, there are many homonyms: words written with completely different kanji that sound exactly the same, very similar (e.g. same modulo pitch accent) or use the same spelling in kana. Here are two words that don't sound the same at all. Let's use Hepburn, because it distinguishes them: kõri and kouri. One has a long o, the other has separate o and u. In hiragana, both are written こうり: exactly the same. kōri might be 公理 (axiom, self-evident truth) or 高利 (high interest rate). kouri is 小売 (retail, lit. "little selling"). If you're having a conversation with someone and don't know which "kõri" they are talking about, high interest rate or axiom, you can ask. But you cannot just ask a written text. You have to work it out from context. Kanji eliminate the ambiguity, vastly simplifying reading. Reading Japanese that has been normalized to kana is murder. Especially if spaces are not introduced to mark word divisions. That is only done in hiragana books for small children! Sometimes this happens in writing. A sentence happens to start with a couple of words that happen to be usually written in hiragana, with some particles after them, and you're left with a puzzle just working out where the word boundaries are. This requires backtracking in the general case; there is no principle like longest match.
- loicd 21d ago
  I don't deny that reading Japanese written in kana alone is currently more painful than with kanji. However, it seems to me that the current writing system is a local optimum and not a global one. If people started writing Japanese using kana alone, some adjustments would eventually be made to make it more readable, and the end result would in my opinion be superior to the current kana/kanji combination. The same thing happened with the latin alphabet. We don't use it the same way the romans used it 2000 years ago: we introduced minuscule letters, spacing, punctuation, accents... At the end of the day, Japanese is a spoken language like all other languages, and there are no reasons why a purely phonetic system should not work for writing it.
  - kazinator 20d ago
    In a Japanese dictionary, you can find homonym clusters as long as something like 12 words. Native speakers get confused in conversations and have to refer to kanji regarding which word they mean. Except they don't write down the kanji; they think of a very common word which has that kanji and say things like, "the shō syllable in my word is the same (kanji) as in shōrai". The vast majority of the Japanese vocabulary consists of word roots made from the combination of two kanji. The language-making itself is not separable from kanji. Japanese is only spoken language like others basically only for small children and idiots. Literate, grown-up Japanese is a written language first.
inkyoto 20d ago
There are historical and cultural reasons for that. Even though hiragana can be traced back to the 5th century, the educated and elites continued to use kanji exclusively until the 20th century, whereas hiragana was relegated to unofficial writing and it first became popular amongst women, hence gaining the condescending status of «female writing». Drawing parallels with hangul (as some have noticed) is not entirely correct as hangul entered the official use in the 15th century and has been in the extensive use for writing since then, even though the use of hanja has ceased only relatively recently. Hiragana entered the stage approximately four centuries later. Katakana, on the other hand, was developed by Buddhist monks in the 9th century to translate texts from India and later to represent borrowed words. The Empire of Japan used kanji and katakana in official documents. Then there is a distinction between the syllabary and vocabulary. Chinese vocabulary and pronunciation has entered Japanese in three distinct waves: go-on, kan-on and tō-on. The Tang dynasty kan-on wave was particularly and enormously important as it has supplied Japanese with a major new pronunciation system, vocabulary, administrative culture and literary. The earlier go-on wave is associated with Buddhist terminology that prefers the go-on readings, and the tō-on wave readings occur particularly in vocabulary brought through medieval and early-modern contact with China. Therefore, the same character can therefore contain several historical layers, for example: 明 has go-on myō, kan-on mei and tō-on min as in: 明王 /myōō/ historical layer: go-on, meaning: a Buddhist «Wisdom King» (such as 不動明王 Fudō Myōō) 明王 /meiō/ historical layer: kan-on, meaning «a wise, enlightened or excellent ruler». Even the pronunciation alone partly tells the reader which historical layer is being invoked. 明朝 is even more interesting as the reading of /myōchō/, being an older myō reading, indicates «tomorrow morning» whereas the /minchō/ reading, being a tō-on, indicates «the Ming dynasty» or related to the Ming dynasty. Neither hiragana nor katakana can preserve such details, and, depending on whom one asks, it may or may not acceptable to a Japanese national. Perhaps the younger generation cares less but it is not all that clear cut.

What surprises me (only a little) is that Japan continues to use Chinese characters when they've got a perfectly good native syllabary.

by kps 21d ago

What surprises me (only a little) is that Japan continues to use Chinese characters when they've got a perfectly good native syllabary.

nrr 21d ago

I don't know if this is from the perspective of having learned Mandarin in elementary school first or if Japanese folks feel similarly, but reading words like, e.g., だいがくいんせい versus 大学院生 is actually a little more annoying because I have to scan more of the line to read the word in question. This is notwithstanding the effect that hiragana has in highlighting grammatical structures; it's a lot like setting off Finnish case endings and verb conjugations in a different color. At least, that's the reason why I prefer still having kanji around.

fenomas 21d ago

Japanese as it currently exists is just really hard to read when written without kanji. A couple reasons: it has TONS of homophones, and it doesn't use spaces, and also it has lots of common words that are only 1 or 2 characters long. So if you're parsing a stream of kana, in the general case there will be several different ways to interpret the next couple characters and you'll constantly be backtracking. So at a minimum, dropping kanji would mean the language needed to develop a system for where spaces go (which is less trivial than it sounds IMO). But also it would need to abandon a lot of homophones or find some way to disambiguate them. It could happen I guess, but I'm not sure how it could happen gradually.

yongjik 21d ago
Korean could serve as a point of comparison, as modern Korean is written mostly without Chinese characters (you could mix them in if you really want to, but approximately nobody bothers), but it does have spaces between words. And yes, when you have a highly inflecting language, "where do the spaces go" is a very nontrivial problem. It's a bit easier for Korean as it has far more available syllables (so fewer homonyms), but you could easily imagine these languages making different tradeoffs and ending up in different places.
- fenomas 21d ago
  Agreed, I think that's a close analogy and it's wild to me how recently Korean dropped kanji. But I imagine having a lot more vowel sounds made it a lot easier. I've wondered whether the two interacted - e.g. if there were word pairs that had previously used the same vowel sounds, but changed after the switch to Hangul to be distinguishable. Do you know by any chance?
  - yongjik 21d ago
    Sino-Korean words are different from Sino-Japanese words in that the sounds are very "rigid": most Chinese characters have one canonical sound, and it is pronounced that way regardless of where it appears (modulo some mostly predictable sound change rules). So, you can't just take a Sino-Korean word and "tweak" its sound to disambiguate - when such a word changes its sound it will no longer be perceived as Sino-Korean at all, which actually happened for some examples such as 산행 (san-haeng, 山行, "mountain + go" = "hike on a mountain") which gave birth to 사냥 (sanyang, "hunting"), a separate word. What did happen was that we lost obscure words that could only be understood by looking at Chinese characters (because they're used so rarely, or because they sound the same as another more common word) - you could still use them if you wanted to, but unless you also write them in Hanja, it would be confusing, and if you mix gratuitous Hanja into your writing just because you like those words, most young readers will find it pretentious, and I fear, mostly unreadable. I can't say we lost much by losing these words. Rather, I think it actually forced writers to select less ambiguous words, which is usually a good thing. (Also, these days most Koreans know much more English than Classical Chinese, so English loanwords can sometimes fill the gap. It helps that most English (or other Western) loanwords sound different from native or Sino-Korean words, so there's less chance of collision.)
- T-R 21d ago
  A lot of material for younger readers uses similar spacing to Korean, like the Pokemon games. It works well enough when you know the vocabulary being used is limited, but even there it gets frustrating. When you're reading, you're trying to identify a substring and map it back to the unit of meaning, which is effectively the kanji. That works seamlessly with Hangul, because it mostly blocks (as syllables) the same way as kanji, and, as you mentioned, the extra vowels and silent consonants provide more disambiguation. With kana, the length you have to scan to read, and then guess at (using only context to disambiguate), a root word, is a lot more arbitrary. Mechanically kana is just less compressed, less aligned, and makes it harder to visually identify/scan for units of meaning. Obviously Korean shows that you can make different tradeoffs, but for Japanese losing the kanji would probably necessitate reworking Kana as well - and unless the pronunciation changed, it would probably need to be in a way that represents the pitch accent, which is a modifier on the whole syllable, rather than just a few extra consonants or vowels.
adrian_b 21d ago
Japanese could be written with the Latin alphabet very well, if a set of kanji radicals were retained and inserted before a part of the words, to disambiguate their meaning. This is a not a new method of writing, but this is how writing was done in the past, for many millennia. The oldest writing systems, like the cuneiform and the Egyptian, also used, besides signs that indicated the pronunciation of a word, determinative signs, which indicated the semantic domain of the word, e.g. it is a name of a human profession, it is a name of an animal, it is a name of a tool made of metal, it is a geographic name, and so on. The determinative signs could be Chinese radicals to continue the tradition, or they could be a special set of emojis.
- fenomas 21d ago
  Sure - it's probably safe to say that any language can he written in any writing system, if one is willing to change both the language and the writing system :)
- inkyoto 20d ago
  > Japanese could be written with the Latin alphabet very well, if a set of kanji radicals were retained and inserted before a part of the words, to disambiguate their meaning. Sort of. The adoption of a Latin script would risk severing cultural continuity – a likely deal breaker in a society such as Japan, where history, tradition, and inherited form are not decorative artefacts but active components of cultural identity. Consider the following two Japanese surnames that – today – are spelled as Kanō and Gotō (I happen to have a close Japanese friend with this surname). They can be rendered as: Kanō: 狩野 and 加納 Gotō: 後藤 and 五島 Leaving the historical pronunciation aside, the issue that we have here is that each Kanji rendition represents a distinct lineage (or a medieval family/clan). The medieval 狩野氏[0] of Izu was an established warrior lineage. Its members occur in the Azuma Kagami, and the family was active by 1180. It belonged to a Fujiwara-derived lineage. 加納[1] is explicitly recorded with historical kana カナフ. A separate 加納氏 belonged to the Miura–Sawara grouping that divided control of Aizu after Yoritomo's Ōshū campaign. The official history of Kitakata lists 加納氏 separately amongst these medieval families. 後藤[2] The 後藤 lineage is attested in the twelfth century. 後藤基清, born in 1155, was the adopted son of 後藤実基 and served as a Kamakura-period warrior. 五島[3] This is the most interesting example as 五島 came from the unrelated medieval 宇久氏. The 宇久 had already been established by the Kamakura period and later controlled the Gotō islands. After Ukuji was promoted to Bunroku's service, he changed his surname from Uku to Gotō, and developed into the Gotō clan, a daimyo of the early-modern times. None of that historical lineage can be faithfully preserved through the use of a Latin script. The characters themselves carry continuity – visual (radicals), literary and civilisational – that transliteration can approximate only by discarding precisely what made the tradition contiguous in the first place and compressing them into a neutered phonetic contraption. Then there is the separate issue that Chinese characters, their readings and the vocabulary associated with them entered Japanese through several successive waves of cultural import, with one particularly important layer having been introduced during the Tang dynasty, when Japan extensively adopted Chinese literary, administrative and cultural models. Different readings, compounds and usages consequently preserve historical or cultural nuances associated with particular periods of Japanese contact with China. [0] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E7%8B%A9%E9%87%8E%E6%B0%8F-1155209 https://kotobank.jp/word/%E7%8B%A9%E9%87%8E%E6%B0%8F-1155209 [1] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%8A%A0%E7%B4%8D-45984 https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%8A%A0%E7%B4%8D-45984 [2] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%BE%8C%E8%97%A4%E5%9F%BA%E6%B8%85-1075291 https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%BE%8C%E8%97%A4%E5%9F%BA%E6%B8%8... [3] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%AE%87%E4%B9%85%E6%B0%8F-1148019 https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%AE%87%E4%B9%85%E6%B0%8F-1148019
rf15 21d ago
> it has TONS of homophones I never get this line of reasoning - so are people listening to spoken japanese just in a perpetual state of confusion because they can't see the associated intended Kanji? Also this coming from a person on a platform who's primary language is commonly pronounced with the last syllable/letter of each word used to start the next one. The engli shlanguage ha sit sown nonsense.
- T-R 21d ago
  Spoken Japanese uses pitch accent to distinguish homophones
  - deleted 21d ago
    [deleted]
  - rf15 21d ago
    So shouldn't the better solution be a few more pronounciation markers beyond two strokes, a circle and tiny letters instead of thousands of chinese characters?
    - T-R 21d ago
      But who is this solution for? Unless you change the pronunciation of the language, it would be adding markers around whole syllables to disambiguate - syllables that represent the kanji they came from (many of which already have phoentic components) - but those syllables would still be less dense and visually identifiable than kanji is for someone who already speaks the language. It's similar to initialisms or emoji in English; it's of course frustrating for people who don't know them, and there are reasonable complaints about some of the extremes, but speakers/writers use them because they find them useful when communicating with an audience that's also assumed to know them.
  - fenomas 21d ago
    In some cases, but note that (a) this is only true for a tiny handful of homophones, and (b) the distinguishing accent varies by region. E.g. "hashi" famously can mean bridge/edge/chopsticks depending on accent, but which accent has which meaning is different in Tokyo vs Osaka.

johnwalkr 21d ago

Well the "native syllabary" is derived from Chinese characters, it's not something that was there and then Chinese characters were shoehorned in later. I think at some early point most Japanese learners (that don't already know a Chinese language) think kanji should be dropped. And at a later point I think most would change their mind as the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

kazinator 21d ago

Firstly, the native syllabary uses conventions that give rise to ambiguities. For instance えい (ei) can encode a long e sound like in "sensei" (teacher) or a separate e and i, like in "deiriguchi" (combined exit and entrance). Secondly, there are many homonyms: words written with completely different kanji that sound exactly the same, very similar (e.g. same modulo pitch accent) or use the same spelling in kana. Here are two words that don't sound the same at all. Let's use Hepburn, because it distinguishes them: kõri and kouri. One has a long o, the other has separate o and u. In hiragana, both are written こうり: exactly the same. kōri might be 公理 (axiom, self-evident truth) or 高利 (high interest rate). kouri is 小売 (retail, lit. "little selling"). If you're having a conversation with someone and don't know which "kõri" they are talking about, high interest rate or axiom, you can ask. But you cannot just ask a written text. You have to work it out from context. Kanji eliminate the ambiguity, vastly simplifying reading. Reading Japanese that has been normalized to kana is murder. Especially if spaces are not introduced to mark word divisions. That is only done in hiragana books for small children! Sometimes this happens in writing. A sentence happens to start with a couple of words that happen to be usually written in hiragana, with some particles after them, and you're left with a puzzle just working out where the word boundaries are. This requires backtracking in the general case; there is no principle like longest match.

loicd 21d ago
I don't deny that reading Japanese written in kana alone is currently more painful than with kanji. However, it seems to me that the current writing system is a local optimum and not a global one. If people started writing Japanese using kana alone, some adjustments would eventually be made to make it more readable, and the end result would in my opinion be superior to the current kana/kanji combination. The same thing happened with the latin alphabet. We don't use it the same way the romans used it 2000 years ago: we introduced minuscule letters, spacing, punctuation, accents... At the end of the day, Japanese is a spoken language like all other languages, and there are no reasons why a purely phonetic system should not work for writing it.
- kazinator 20d ago
  In a Japanese dictionary, you can find homonym clusters as long as something like 12 words. Native speakers get confused in conversations and have to refer to kanji regarding which word they mean. Except they don't write down the kanji; they think of a very common word which has that kanji and say things like, "the shō syllable in my word is the same (kanji) as in shōrai". The vast majority of the Japanese vocabulary consists of word roots made from the combination of two kanji. The language-making itself is not separable from kanji. Japanese is only spoken language like others basically only for small children and idiots. Literate, grown-up Japanese is a written language first.

inkyoto 20d ago

There are historical and cultural reasons for that. Even though hiragana can be traced back to the 5th century, the educated and elites continued to use kanji exclusively until the 20th century, whereas hiragana was relegated to unofficial writing and it first became popular amongst women, hence gaining the condescending status of «female writing». Drawing parallels with hangul (as some have noticed) is not entirely correct as hangul entered the official use in the 15th century and has been in the extensive use for writing since then, even though the use of hanja has ceased only relatively recently. Hiragana entered the stage approximately four centuries later. Katakana, on the other hand, was developed by Buddhist monks in the 9th century to translate texts from India and later to represent borrowed words. The Empire of Japan used kanji and katakana in official documents. Then there is a distinction between the syllabary and vocabulary. Chinese vocabulary and pronunciation has entered Japanese in three distinct waves: go-on, kan-on and tō-on. The Tang dynasty kan-on wave was particularly and enormously important as it has supplied Japanese with a major new pronunciation system, vocabulary, administrative culture and literary. The earlier go-on wave is associated with Buddhist terminology that prefers the go-on readings, and the tō-on wave readings occur particularly in vocabulary brought through medieval and early-modern contact with China. Therefore, the same character can therefore contain several historical layers, for example: 明 has go-on myō, kan-on mei and tō-on min as in: 明王 /myōō/ historical layer: go-on, meaning: a Buddhist «Wisdom King» (such as 不動明王 Fudō Myōō) 明王 /meiō/ historical layer: kan-on, meaning «a wise, enlightened or excellent ruler». Even the pronunciation alone partly tells the reader which historical layer is being invoked. 明朝 is even more interesting as the reading of /myōchō/, being an older myō reading, indicates «tomorrow morning» whereas the /minchō/ reading, being a tō-on, indicates «the Ming dynasty» or related to the Ming dynasty. Neither hiragana nor katakana can preserve such details, and, depending on whom one asks, it may or may not acceptable to a Japanese national. Perhaps the younger generation cares less but it is not all that clear cut.