I used to know how to write in Japanese

You didn't even try to do it the way Koreans did it, though. When Koreans dropped hanja in favour of a hangeul-only script, they adopted spacing because spaced text is much easier to understand than unspaced text. Likewise, products like old Japanese videogames which couldn't use kanji due to technical limitations used spaced kana because it's just much better and no one's masochistic enough to not use them if they don't have access to kanji. The Japanese mixed script doesn't use spaces largely because kanji already serve as word dividers. If you remove that function, everyone sane will use spaces, and pro-kanji arguers will leave them out to make the proposition seem mad.

Importantly, spaces also make it much easier to recognize the shapes of the words.

It's the chief reason people say kana-only writing (like in old videogames for example) is hard to read: People competent at reading any language don't spell things out in detail, even when we subvocalize we first recognize the shape of the scribbles and our brain has a shortcut from a certain set of scribbles to certain morphemes/words, where the solid feeling of meaning comes from. No one actually reads these English posts by vocalizing letter by letter to slowly build the words together.

Every competent reader of Japanese is first and foremost used to the kanji-hiragana mixed script, and has shortcuts for the kanji forms of words and the sounds of those words. The hiragana only forms? Not so much. So when they complain about hiragana only being hard to read, they're not lying. It really is harder. But it's not harder due to any inherent defect in a hiragana-only script, it's just about a lack of exposure to form those shortcuts that make reading feel easy.

Meme sentences designed to be hard to read that you'd never see in real life aren't an actual point. By that token, the Buffalo buffalo sentence argues for the urgent adoption of kanji in English.

Likewise, in my native Finnish:

  - Kokko, kokoo koko kokko kokoon.
  - Koko kokkoko?
  - Koko kokko.

ie.

  - Kokko, assemble the bonfire.
  - The entire bonfire? 
  - The entire bonfire

It's perfectly readable despite the meme value.

Similarily, "kuusi palaa" can mean:

  kuusi palaa = the spruce is on fire
  kuusi palaa = the spruce returns
  kuusi palaa = the number six is on fire
  kuusi palaa = the number six returns
  kuusi palaa = six (of them, or six pieces of something) are on fire
  kuusi palaa = six (as above) return
  kuusi palaa = your moon is on fire
  kuusi palaa = your moon returns
  kuusi palaa = six pieces

Do we need to urgently adopt kanji in order to avoid homophony?

  > Chinese and Japanese have too many homephones to use a spelling system like Korean.

Curiously, it's possible to write books entirely in pinyin: https://pinyin.info/readings/pinyin_riji_duanwen.html

Similarily, I highly doubt people would've printed the Roumaji Zasshi if they believed it to be incomprehensible: https://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko17/bunko17_d0035...

  > Third time: After World War II, General MacArthur commissioned a team of American education specialists to work with Japanese experts to discuss whether to abolish kanji entirely, and to consider the possibility of fully romanizing the Japanese language. Yet, they decided to keep Japanese.

J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan goes into details on this. There were kanji abolitionists and pro-kanji people in both the American and Japanese administrations, and it definitely wasn't just a popularity contest. Things happened such as one pro-roumaji principal who enthusiastically took part in roumaji feasibility experiments being assigned elsewhere because he was having results, or one American pro-kanji official decreeing that roumaji publications should be published in triplicate since there were three competing romanization systems - Nihon-shiki, Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn - so they wouldn't unduly advantage any particular romanization system. This of course also just so happened to make roumaji publishing three times more expensive. Whether fairness or limiting roumaji publishing by financial means was the real motivation is left as an exercise to the reader.

It doesn't even need to do that. Korean and Vietnamese are easy examples where all the writing is phonetic despite Korean having basically the same structure and problems with Chinese loans as Japanese, and Vietnamese having a ton of Sinitic loans and general properties that are basically the same as Chinese. Yet phonetic writing just works.

J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan goes into details on this.

There were kanji abolitionists and pro-kanji people in both the American and Japanese administrations, and it definitely wasn't just a popularity contest. Things happened such as one pro-roumaji principal who enthusiastically took part in roumaji feasibility experiments being assigned elsewhere because he was having results, or one American pro-kanji official decreeing that roumaji publications should be published in triplicate since there were three competing romanization systems - Nihon-shiki, Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn - so they wouldn't unduly advantage any particular romanization system.

This of course also just so happened to make roumaji publishing three times more expensive. Whether fairness or limiting roumaji publishing by financial means was the real motivation is left as an exercise to the reader.

> If that's true, I don't see how hangul could have had any typewriter-based advantage over hanja. From the typewriter's perspective, there's no difference.

There are mechanical hangeul typewriters that, while more complicated than Latin or katakana typewriters, are still completely usable for normal writing. The reason hangeul fonts are hard is that a hangeul syllable occupies a standard-sized block, and in eg. careful handwriting the writer would adjust the sizes and positions of the characters to be aesthetically nice. For example, in 해 he the ㅎ andㅐ letters are both the same size. When you write 핸 hen, see how the h especially becomes smaller? In typewritten hangeul, that first consonant is always that small, so you can use only one size of initial h and so on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UenaIex_ZXY

You can see from the output in this video how the sizes of letters are very standard and somewhat disproportionate, eg. in CV type syllables the vowel lines are somewhat giant compared to the quarter-of-the-block sizeish consonants, etc.

That way you can still write by pressing alphabet buttons, with some controls as to where you want the letter to go in the block. It's a bit more complicated, but nothing compared to the nightmare that are proper Chinese character typewriters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDkR87zHdXk

>>> he is 考慮ed as the 正当 財産 of some 一 or 他 of their 娘s.

> This doesn't appear to be a problem, but I still felt the need to call out what looks like the use of an exclusively masculine pronoun (in modern Chinese) to refer to "daughters".

IIRC, in Japanese, 他 is sometimes used for "hoka", which means "other"; as in, "Do you have this item of clothing in other (他) sizes?" The original text says, "some one or other of their daughters"; so that seems to be Claude's thinking.

> Do you know whether Japanese use of kanji focuses more on establishing that a kanji corresponds to some Japanese syllables and using that kanji wherever those syllables occur [as suggested by "作 no 答"], or more on using kanji to represent certain semantics however those semantics might be pronounced [as might suggest "言 no 答"]?

I know a moderate amount of Mandarin (along with smatterings of Cantonese), and about 3 months' spare-time study of Japanese in preparation for a recent trip there. (Note the shopping theme in my example above.)

My expectation, which matches my (very small) experience, is that Japanese are trying to write Japanese; and that therefore they have Japanese words in mind that they're trying to represent with Chinese characters.

It is absolutely not the case that a given Chinese character will always be pronounced the same way in Japanese. For one, multi-character Chinese words are also munged into Japanese words. For two, even for single-syllable words there's a context: e.g,. Japanese has two different ways to say "one", but they use "一" for both. I'm sure I've run into other Chinese characters that are pronounced differently depending on whether they're in a verb or an adjective.

So for example:

> Mr. Bennet 返答ed that he had 不.

> Do 不 you 欲 to 知 who has 取n it?

Remember that we're discussing a hypothetical universe where English speakers use the Chinese characters, but the vast majority of them don't know Chinese.

In English we use "not" in both cases, even though in Mandarin in the first case I'd probably construct a sentence using "没" in the first instance and "不" in the second.

So what would happen in our hypothetical universe? Given that most speakers don't know Mandarin, using "不" in both cases is probably the simplest, most stable result. One could imagine complicated rules for whether you write "不", "没", or "未", which are taught in school and maintained, even though they're all read as "not", and even though most people don't know Mandarin. But it would have to be one of those things which (like Chinese characters themselves) people decided they liked about their writing system and didn't want to give up.

Similarly:

> I'm not comfortable with the use of 作; just because the word in the idiom is make doesn't mean that any making is involved.

And yet, in English, "made a cake" and "made no reply" have exactly the same verb. Again, one can imagine it going both ways, depending on how things were established and maintained: One could imagine using "作" in both cases; or one could imagine using two different characters for two different shades of meaning, just as in Chinese there's 他, 她, 它, and 祂; or perhaps 的 and 得 (which I'm not sure people would naturally consider different words if they were only exposed to the spoken word).

The real limitation here is that there's no way ready-made to indicate the "make" -> "made" transition, as you can with "makes" ("作s" ) and "making" ("作ing").