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Japanese writing system basics

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Re: Japanese writing system basics

#31

Post by laretluval »

rett12 wrote: post #14
akavi wrote: post #5

Earlier 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%…

Korean has just as many homophones and used to be written with characters like Japanese. Now they are doing just fine with their phonetic writing system.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#32

Post by ggreer »

bootload wrote: post #4

@bemmu is that a square symbol or something else?

It's the kanji for mouth. Depending on context, it can be pronounced "kuchi", "guchi", or "kou".

That's the big problem with logographic writing systems: there's no connection between the symbol and the sound. Japanese lets you fall-back to phonetic alphabet, but other languages (Chinese) don't have that feature.

Still, that was a fun post to read.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#33

Post by Margh »

sidedishes wrote: post #19
Margh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spaces carry a lot of semantic weight, as do other components such as capitalisation and punctuation (most of which in use in Japan is borrowed from romaji anyway). iimagineitdgetprettyannoyingtryingtoreadenglishifitwaswrittenlikethisbutitshardtotellwithouthavingdonesofortwentyyears

Well, in English spaces certainly carry weight, partly because the word unit has so many characters. In languages like Chinese and Japanese, units /are/ the characters (or a few of them). Particles then make natural separators in strings of kanji.

That's exactly why you need more than just hiragana, it'd be too difficult to tell what each character was parf of at speed. Something like katakana replacing kanji and hiragana for particles would be perfect.

Modern Japanese could learn a few lessons from hangul imo.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#34

Post by sidedishes »

E6300 wrote: post #26
sidedishes wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, but that's spoken Japanese. Different phrases are prevalent between spoken and written Japanese, as a workaround for those ambiguities.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#35

Post by fourneau »

akavi wrote: post #23
rett12 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not that you have less context, as much as you /need/ less context. Instead of a few extra words to describe something, you get a different character.

Here's a great example of how in writing you can disambiguate "aunt"/"older woman": https://twitter.com/MaggieSensei/status/765769637372030977

In the above example all three are read as おば (pronounced: oba). When spoken you still need to differentiate, but it'd either be obvious from context or you'd just explain it manually.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#36

Post by Gigablah »

ggreer wrote: post #32
bootload wrote: post #4

@bemmu is that a square symbol or something else?

It's the kanji for mouth. Depending on context, it can be pronounced "kuchi", "guchi", or "kou". That's the big problem with logographic writing systems: there's no connection between the symbol and the sound. Japanese lets you fall-back to phonetic alphabet, but other languages (Chinese) don't have that feature. Still, that was a fun post to read.

Not to mention that the katakana for "ro" looks really similar depending on font: ロ

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#37

Post by jaykru »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #17

If 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…

>already terrible Don't quite see how Chinese is so terrible. It's a remarkably efficient mode of writing for a language filled with monosyllabic words and homophones.

Japanese's appropriation of hanzi is largely a historical accident due to geographical circumstance, but most learned in the language most would agree it's far more efficient than simply using hiragana or katakana or even romaji; disambiguation by pictographs (though in modern times they are more accurately phono-semantic compounds) is of great value in written language where space is at a premium.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#38

Post by chewxy »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #17

If 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…

That's because you're thinking in English. "Kingly" is a very English way of thinking of things (as in king-like behaviour for example). In Chinese and Japanese, there simply isn't a way to describe it as elegantly as in English

In Chinese it'd be 王道 (the tao of the King if translated directly to English), which has a completely different connotation (it's more holistic in concept (i.e. it has an overloaded meaning) when compared to "kingly" in English, which has a more singular-use meaning).

"Royal" itself is an overloaded adjective in English. AFAIK there are no adjectives in the east asian language that has the same semantic meaning as "royal" - The Japanese version would simply be 王の, which translate to "belonging to the king", while the chinese version would be 王室的 or 王室之(belonging to the king's office(I guess you could say crown)[0]). Ditto with "regal". There simply isn't any proper translation for the adjectives in English.

Other than that, in Chinese, there is the concept of a radical, which can be combined to inform the readers about the context it's used in. In Japanese, as bemmu wrote, it'd be additional kanas to inform of context.

[0]Fun fact: 之 and の used to denote the same things up to about 300-ish years ago I believe (timeline could be wrong). In Japanese 之 may be pronounced the same as の. Either way, the Chinese and Japanese words are very much the same, barring some minor kanji differences. Grammarwise, however, it's a completely different language

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#39

Post by azernik »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #30

Ancient 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.

This is not like Hebrew, modern or paleo. The Hebrew, Phoenician, and Proto-Sinaitic alphabets were purely phonetic, they just happened to not represent vowels (only consonants). But there were no ideographs involved - the system was derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics, but it did not preserve their meaning, only preserving them (in much-simplified forms) as mnemonics for the sounds. Similar to the origins of the Japanese kana system, but NOT its use of kanji.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#40

Post by [deleted] »

andreygrehov wrote: post #7

I 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?

[deleted]
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