[Oisín]

Originally Posted by wataru

And yet somehow, the Japanese language and people still live on. Amazing, isn't it?

Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's impractical.

There’s a world of difference between the Japanese language and the Japanese writing system. The language will evolve whichever way it will—that’s more or less out of human control. The writing system, however, is fully within human (or rather, governmental) control. The current system is unnecessarily complex and impractical, just like the English (and yes, the Chinese) system is. Both of them are based on tradition, rather than on giving the most phonetically accurate, simple, and practical written reproduction of the spoken word, avoiding ambiguity wherever necessary. That can, quite simply, be said to be the basic purpose of all writing system, right? To convey the same meaning that spoken words convey, but on paper.

Personally, I think both the Japanese, Chinese, and English writing systems fail at this. All of them could be simplified a lot to adhere much more closely to their spoken counterparts, without introducing ambiguity. In Chinese (Mandarin, at least), due to the very large degree of homophony, the possibilities are more limited than in English or Japanese, but it would still be quite possible to simplify the writing system without losing clarity.

Obviously, you’re all the experts here, not me, but it’s my understanding that if pitch marks denoting the ‘step-up’ or ‘step-down’ were employed, a simple phonetic script (like Romaji or Hiragana) could fairly aptly be used exclusively in Japanese, as well. It is possible to write, and be understood, entirely in Hiragana, right? Add the concept of word spacing and pitch marking, and wouldn’t the result be almost entirely as unambiguous as writing where Kanji is used? Or rather: wouldn’t the result be almost entirely as unambiguous as the spoken utterance it would represent?

That’s what I mean by impractical: a simpler system could be set up without losing any basic information. Sure, Kanji have other functions as well, dealing with register, aesthetics, and other things; but for pure information conveying, they seem to me rather redundant.

[analogika]

a) they're rather faster at conveying meaning (provided they're recognized)

b) they disambiguate

c) you're still right IMO.

One problem is, though that the writing has strongly influenced the language. Most compound words are read as on-yomi, but the on-yomi did not even exist in Japanese until they were imported with the Kanji characters!

So having a compound word be *completely* different and entirely unrelated to the Japanese root terms, as it would be were the Kanji eliminated, would make the language near impossible to learn and just completely random.

Of course, learning vocabulary and learning Kanji AND vocabulary aren't all that far apart, in terms of work.

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by analogika

a) they're rather faster at conveying meaning (provided they're recognized)

If you go by a per-syllable basis, then yes. A single character can convey the meaning of a three- or four-syllable word (this is of course irrelevant in Chinese, where one character is always one syllable).

If you mean the time it takes to interpret the meaning the character conveys, as opposed to the time it takes to read it out as a ‘word’ and interpret that meaning, I don’t think you’re right. I don’t think a Japanese will interpret the correct meaning from the Kanji 時 any faster than an English speaker will interpret the meaning of the word ‘time’. Words are usually read as blocks, rather than constituents, as well, and the few milliseconds it takes the brain to intercept the shape of the word/character and turn it into the meaning associated with that word/character doesn’t differ much, if at all.

Edit: Assuming 時 does mean ‘time’ in Japanese, and is written like that, of course; that part was a guess.

Originally Posted by analogika

b) they disambiguate

They disambiguate compared to a purely phonetic writing system. But they don’t disambiguate compared to the spoken word, since any ambiguity present in a(n accurate) phonetic writing system will also be present in speech (though likely lessened by intonation, pauses, etc.).

‘There’, ‘their’ and ‘they’re’ disambiguate in English, too, but if they were all spelt simply ‘ther’, it wouldn’t remove any ambiguity present in the spoken language, since all three words really are ambiguous when spoken, and only interpretable via context.

One could of course argue that disambiguation is more important in writing than in speech, since intonation and other factors help to disambiguate homophones in speech, something which is unavailable in writing. But in most languages, these homophones are few enough that they don’t present a problem, even if left ambiguous in writing. In this respect, Mandarin is one of the very few languages I can think of that constitute an exception: there are simply too many homophones in Mandarin for a purely phonetic writing system to function properly (except if some way were found to include intonation, pauses, etc. into writing); a certain amount of character-like disambiguation is needed.

Though I can’t, of course, speak for the entire inventory of Japanese, I’d say that the presence of more polysyllabic words, the higher degree of grammatical inflection, and the distinction between short and long vowels and consonants all help to make Japanese heterophonous enough for this not to be strictly necessary.

Originally Posted by analogika

c) you're still right IMO.

Thank you

[Chuckit]

We all really need to switch to the Deseret alphabet.

[anonymac]

nuke the japanese language!!! english > all

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by anonymac 

nuke the japanese language!!! english > all

Well, that’s one approach.

But obviously, !Xóõ > English.

[Chuckit]

Yeah? Well, !Xóõ you!