7 ms·

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 sep

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 5d 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 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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.

loicd 5d 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 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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.