Japanese writing system basics
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Japanese writing system basics
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Re: Japanese writing system basics
#2Ok, thats a fun hack.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#3Japanese is an unusual language to write. It's influenced by Chinese (in two separate eras), English and perhaps many other systems. Symbols alone aren't a perfect fit for the language (since they add tense and such), but neither is an English style alphabet.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#4@bemmu is that a square symbol or something else?
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#5Japanese is an unusual language to write. It's influenced by Chinese (in two separate eras), English and perhaps many other systems. Symbols alone aren't a perfect fit for the language (since they add tense and such), but neither is an English style alphabet.
Why wouldn't an "English style" (roman alphabet) style alphabet work?
Romaji works just fine, albeit with the addition of a macron diacritic. Though if it really was the primary writing system, a way to notate tone accent might be necessary (My gut says no, it carries relatively little semantic weight).
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#6Ok, thats a fun hack.
A hack for learning Japanese, or a hack for getting inadvertent upvotes? :)
I seem to recall there were books that used that style of progressive foreign language learning, where they started out replacing a single word and then kept replacing more and more until, at the end, the entire story was written in the foreign language.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#7I liked the beginning and expected the next word after "mouth" to look almost the same, with a subtle change, which would be a logical extension. But it was quite a jump from a simple square (口) to god-knows-what (食).
Also, why 食 is translated as "Eclipse" in Google?
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#8How many symbols are there? And how would the keyboard look like though?
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#9I liked the beginning and expected the next word after "mouth" to look almost the same, with a subtle change, which would be a logical extension. But it was quite a jump from a simple square (口) to god-knows-what (食). Also, why 食 is translated as "Eclipse" in Google?
Maybe because in the eclipse the moon eats the sun.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#10Japanese is an unusual language to write. It's influenced by Chinese (in two separate eras), English and perhaps many other systems. Symbols alone aren't a perfect fit for the language (since they add tense and such), but neither is an English style alphabet.
Why wouldn't an "English style" (roman alphabet) style alphabet work? Romaji works just fine, albeit with the addition of a macron diacritic. Though if it really was the primary writing system, a way to notate tone accent might be necessary (My gut says no, it carries relatively little semantic weight).
There are a lot of homophones between Chinese loanwords in Japanese. A writing system like Romaji that only records the phonetic information would be no more useful than just hiragana (which might then arguably more useful as it aligns with the syllables?)