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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

by 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 21d 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.
- loicd 20d ago
  > Japanese is only spoken language like others basically only for small children and idiots. Literate, grown-up Japanese is a written language first. I seriously doubt that. Literacy levels rose in Japan during the Meiji era and that produced pressure towards simplification of the writing system. Sure, Japan didn't go all the way to a pure kana system or to a latin-derived script, but the reasons are political and cultural (and there is nothing wrong with that) rather than linguistic. In any cases, you didn't disprove my point, which is that the need for kanji is self-fulfilling. It feels necessary, precisely because its usage prevents the evolution of the phonetic kana system into something useful.
  - kazinator 20d ago
    > need for kanji is self-fulfilling Well, yes? The language is built on kanji. In a 100,000 word dictionary, the vast amount of content is words that someone made up by putting together kanji. It is kanji-first. None of it makes sense when you strip away the kanji, and formation of new words is blocked. Kanji is a cultural cornerstone. Before literacy, commoners had 5000 word vocabularies cradle to grave. Anything beyond that was the domain of the erudite elite. > the phonetic kana system The kana system is quasi-phonetic. It doesn't capture phonetics accurately, like IPA, and has ambiguities of its own. But, again, phonetics doesn't help when twelve words have identical phonetics! Sure, you can fix all this if you just change Japanese into another language.
    - notrustincloud 20d ago
      Lol. Flashback to me having this exact conversation with a new Gaijin-kun アメリカの人 at about his second or third month in Tohoku...32 years ago. "They could just do it all in Romaji and save so much work." and even today some of my Japanese friends joke with me about how hard 漢字 can be, they laugh because they know its hard for them and admit they wouldnt do it if they had been born anywhere else. So, it is absolutely baked in and kanji first. without kanji the following tongue twister is indecipherable. Niwaniwaniwatori ga, uraniwanimoniwaniwatoriga iru. 庭には二羽鶏が、裏庭にも二羽鶏がいる。
      - kazinator 19d ago
        I made a variant of this one myself: 中庭の中には、鶏の二羽がワニにお世話になりました。〜と、誰かに岩の上で言われた。
        notrustincloud 19d ago
        Thank you, thats a fun one. I particularly like the play on niwa and wani. As for the other premise that modifying the phonetics to accomplish a simplification is based on a narrow view of the reason for retaining kanji literacy... there are important and substantive records for business, legal, and actively functional culture which exist in kanji and require kanji literacy to maintain agreement in society that is one of the differences between Japan and most other places. Who else still operates on contractual obligations from written records of the 17th century? Many current farming leases for large parts of the country are backed with the actual stamped, brush stroke written land records from then, stored at the prefecture on the original papers. Losing the ability to read and write kanji would be detrimental to ongoing cultural stability, and so it will not and should not be entertained by anyone living in that system. People living in a 'for now' mindset are irrelevant to actuality.

by loicd 21d ago

kazinator 21d 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.

loicd 20d ago
> Japanese is only spoken language like others basically only for small children and idiots. Literate, grown-up Japanese is a written language first. I seriously doubt that. Literacy levels rose in Japan during the Meiji era and that produced pressure towards simplification of the writing system. Sure, Japan didn't go all the way to a pure kana system or to a latin-derived script, but the reasons are political and cultural (and there is nothing wrong with that) rather than linguistic. In any cases, you didn't disprove my point, which is that the need for kanji is self-fulfilling. It feels necessary, precisely because its usage prevents the evolution of the phonetic kana system into something useful.
- kazinator 20d ago
  > need for kanji is self-fulfilling Well, yes? The language is built on kanji. In a 100,000 word dictionary, the vast amount of content is words that someone made up by putting together kanji. It is kanji-first. None of it makes sense when you strip away the kanji, and formation of new words is blocked. Kanji is a cultural cornerstone. Before literacy, commoners had 5000 word vocabularies cradle to grave. Anything beyond that was the domain of the erudite elite. > the phonetic kana system The kana system is quasi-phonetic. It doesn't capture phonetics accurately, like IPA, and has ambiguities of its own. But, again, phonetics doesn't help when twelve words have identical phonetics! Sure, you can fix all this if you just change Japanese into another language.
  - notrustincloud 20d ago
    Lol. Flashback to me having this exact conversation with a new Gaijin-kun アメリカの人 at about his second or third month in Tohoku...32 years ago. "They could just do it all in Romaji and save so much work." and even today some of my Japanese friends joke with me about how hard 漢字 can be, they laugh because they know its hard for them and admit they wouldnt do it if they had been born anywhere else. So, it is absolutely baked in and kanji first. without kanji the following tongue twister is indecipherable. Niwaniwaniwatori ga, uraniwanimoniwaniwatoriga iru. 庭には二羽鶏が、裏庭にも二羽鶏がいる。
    - kazinator 19d ago
      I made a variant of this one myself: 中庭の中には、鶏の二羽がワニにお世話になりました。〜と、誰かに岩の上で言われた。
      - notrustincloud 19d ago
        Thank you, thats a fun one. I particularly like the play on niwa and wani. As for the other premise that modifying the phonetics to accomplish a simplification is based on a narrow view of the reason for retaining kanji literacy... there are important and substantive records for business, legal, and actively functional culture which exist in kanji and require kanji literacy to maintain agreement in society that is one of the differences between Japan and most other places. Who else still operates on contractual obligations from written records of the 17th century? Many current farming leases for large parts of the country are backed with the actual stamped, brush stroke written land records from then, stored at the prefecture on the original papers. Losing the ability to read and write kanji would be detrimental to ongoing cultural stability, and so it will not and should not be entertained by anyone living in that system. People living in a 'for now' mindset are irrelevant to actuality.