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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 t

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 5d 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 4d 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

fenomas 5d 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 4d 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