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Japanese writing system basics
21–30 of 347 posts
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#22I 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?
That is not wrong, but weird to give as a first definition. The word "食" can mean either food or eclipse. In both cases it is read the same way; so I assume this happened because they did not have a symbol for eclipse so decided to use a homophone.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
It doesn't work due to the insane amount of homophones. When you are speaking with someone you have context and you can discern the meaning of what it's said. But random words or texts can change it's meaning depending of what character is used. And the tone system doesn't help as it can be seen in Chinese pinyin. For example, how many kanji can be read as 'shuu'/しゅう: http://jisho.org/search/%E3%81%97%E3%82%85%E3%81%…
Why do you have less context in writing than in speech?
I'd be willing to bet heavily that the vast majority of those "homophones" are primarily writing-only, domain specific or archaic "shorthands", which are referred to in speech with slightly more verbose alternatives. Switching to a non-character based system would admittedly in that case mean some domain specific writing would be slightly less compact, but that seems a reasonable tradeoff given the unwieldiness of the current writing system.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#24Slightly off-topic but can anyone here comment on the candies they ship? Are they just ordinary sweets? I've never heard about Japan being famous about candies like Switzerland is about chocolate.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#25Sometimes I wonder if all these people that criticize or that think that a Latin alphabet can be adapted seamlessly to all languages have tried to study past a beginner level any
logographic language.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?)
It would also be no more or less useful than just speaking. Do Japanese people carry around flash cards with kanji on them to disambiguate their speech?
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#27The only problem is that you learn all 2000 at the very minimum and more than that if you actually want to do something practical.
Each one has more than 1 reading, a particular stroke order, and many other things.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#28Japanese 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.
But then Chinese moved to simplified Chinese, making some symbols very different.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#29If 口 substitutes for mouth -- the adjective form of "mouth" is "oral", an etymologically (and audibly!) distinct word. Should that use 口 too? If king is 王, kingly is 王ly, and royal is 王al, what is regal? If mouth is 口 and mouthed is 口ed, why would ate be 食t rather than 食ed? Japan misinterpreted the Chinese writing system (already terrible) into easily the worst writing system known to mankind. It won't look cute when…
I think you're pointing out the idiosyncrasies of English here.
"Mouth" is both a noun and a verb. The past tense of "eat" is "ate", not "eated".
No wonder English is so difficult to learn.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#30Ancient Pictographic (before Paleo) Hebrew is like this too. Except they only have 22 letters, there's a 23rd but it is no longer part of the 'Aleph Bet'. Hebrew originally had no vowels, and thus today they only put the vowel system in when it's a word people don't normally know how to pronounce. Chinese is similar as well, and I'm sure there's a couple more languages.