I’ve recently come to be somewhat interested in the historical debate surrounding whether the abolition of kanji would be a positive or negative development for the language and those using it. Admittedly, it doesn’t seem to be much of a debate as of late, but it was carried out in both Vietnam and Korea, which have moved away from using Chinese characters, and the debate has been had in both China and Japan in the past.

There seem to have been two main factions in Japan favoring abolition – those favoring the replacement of kanji and kana with romaji (ローマ字派, the romaji faction), and those favoring the replacement of kanji with the sole use of kana (かな派, the kana faction). There were even organizations set up to promote these positions and convince Japanese society to move away from using kanji, although I can’t really find any major ones active today.

I guess I’m curious to what you all, as learners think. Considering that Japan has achieved high literacy rates while retaining kanji, are the arguments for its abolition simply superfluous and obsolete? Or are there other advantages to abolishing kanji that would warrant reopening this debate? If this is so, would it be better for Japan to adopt romaji, all kana, or another system altogether?

Probably not the most pressing topic to think about when learning Japanese, but considering the unique challenges posed in learning kanji, I'm sure some of you have some opinions on it.

While when I was first learning, I was praying that something like this would miraculously happen and change the language forever, after five years studying, I've come to the conclusion that, barring the addition of some form of "spelling" in Kana, Japanese without Kanji would be incredibly difficult, so much so as to make the language even harder for second language learners.

In terms of pronunciation and phonetic variety, Japanese is undoubtedly one of the easiest languages in the world. While Chinese could probably get away with romanization due to tones (even though I personally don't think they would or should), with Japanese, the high number of homophones would render any perceived benefits of Kanji abolition useless. And while some people might not agree with me, I personally find it excruciating to read a text in all Kana-- even worse if it's in all romaji. Before the Kanji option came along, the Pokemon games in Japanese were something else, let me tell you.

The only way I could see the removal of Kanji "working" (even if it wasn't necessarily supported from a cultural standpoint) would be to introduce a system of "spelling" to help distinguish homonyms. Much in the same way English distinguishes between "bear" and "bare," Japanese could theoretically add a spelling system to distinguish words with the same pronunciation, but even then, such would almost guarantee a move away from Japanese's one-to-one system of phonetic representation via Kana. While markings above the words could work, even then, I simply can't see such a system being implemented.

patriconia Wrote:Considering that Japan has achieved high literacy rates while retaining kanji, are the arguments for its abolition simply superfluous and obsolete?

But did they? One common position about this is that "The unusually high rate of literacy in Japan is partly attributable to the fact that basic literacy is defined as the ability to read the syllabaries and a limited number of characters only." Of course many adults can read well pretty much anything, but we know nothing about the real literacy rate and how much it would be improved with a more straightforward writing system (and accompanying changes, such as dealing with homonyms that can't be understood from context.)

On the other hand, kana-only doesn't seem to be a good solution, since ITWOULDBEAKINTOREADINGEVERYTINGINALLCAPSANDWITHOUTSPACESALLTHETIME. Romaji with spaces would be much more readable.

I personally don't care that much, I think it's nice to have something so bizarre and complicated still alive. If I were so against it, I could always stay using only my own language and not deal with anything written by the Japanese people, as most people do.

patriconia Wrote:There seem to have been two main factions in Japan favoring abolition – those favoring the replacement of kanji and kana with romaji (ローマ字派, the romaji faction), and those favoring the replacement of kanji with the sole use of kana (かな派, the kana faction).

Doesn't it seem strange that their names aren't rendered in the character set they are advocating? Or maybe these are names given from outside the movement.

I never thought it'd be better to remove kanji. Perhaps it's because of all the manga scanlations I read that were done by people who didn't agree with me on the acceptable use of foreign words in translations, but the character densities and frequent vowels of many of these words' romaji transcriptions made them very difficult to read, even compared to kana (which I found benefit from as soon as I could remember them).

It only took a few months for me to get used to the idea of using kanji (it certainly wasn't easy at that point), and after I did, I couldn't see any merit to using romaji (or just kana) in actual Japanese. Romaji is useful for transcribing things for use in another language, that's it. Kana is best used with kanji in my opinion, kana only texts have their uses (for young children and maybe for Japanese students).

I had a debate like this with someone on YouTube; they claimed that since the Koreans successfully switched to hangul, that Japan should switch to using only kana. Their only argument was "it doesn't cause the Koreans problems"; just because they did it doesn't mean it works better (and Koreans still use hanja in some cases, though I haven't studied the language enough to say when they usually use them). Sure, you learn the writing system more quickly, but you lose most of the etymological connections, especially with 漢語, since the Japanese never 'updated' their pronunciations to imitate the newer Chinese readings and just took the new ones as they came.

@gdaxeman

Quote:On the other hand, kana-only doesn't seem to be a good solution, since ITWOULDBEAKINTOREADINGEVERYTINGINALLCAPSANDWITHOUTSPACESALLTHETIME. Romaji with spaces would be much more readable.

Kana only texts (like the Pokemon games) use some kind of spacing convention, but I didn't look at it closely enough to say what it is specifically; it's basically just putting a space after a word+particle chunk, though. Only thing I'm not sure of is how it treats long compounds.

Quote:Of course many adults can read well pretty much anything, but we know nothing about the real literacy rate [...]

That can be said of most countries, actually. In the US, for example, general literacy is essentially a rewarded title to people who complete a certain level of school; it's thought that the literacy rates are much, much lower than suggested by this criterion.
I'm fairly sure the same is true for most of the planet (well, for countries with mandatory schooling that includes reading lessons). It's why newspapers use longer, less precise phrasing when there's a perfectly good word that's considered something a literate person should know.

As far as I can tell from (alleged) actual data, using romaji or all kana both are fine in practice. I don't think that the kanji are going away in my lifetime, so I'm not so interested in the debate. I think it's more a cultural and emotional issue.

The spacing conventions for pure kana are generally either "where short pauses in speech would be" or "after particles"

So it would be kana with spaces? It would only be like writing all in uppercase then.

sholum Wrote:That can be said of most countries, actually. In the US, for example, general literacy is essentially a rewarded title to people who complete a certain level of school; it's thought that the literacy rates are much, much lower than suggested by this criterion.

It's the same in Brazil, and I've read it's even worse in China. In Portuguese it's actually pretty easy to read anything, the problem is that many people lack text interpretation skills – they understand the words but not the exact message. In Chinese the thing is that people who don't memorize the characters can't even reach that point because they can't read at all (something that is said to be very common in most of the country, in poor and rural areas), and those who don't memorize which characters are used for each single word can't write.

I would like to see both Japan and China switch to romanization, but I don't think it's going to happen, at least not in my lifetime. They missed several opportunities to do it, and it's hard to see when the next one would arise. This topic has been discussed many times on this forum and others.

All-kana would be fine too but if you're going to take the drastic step of removing kanji you might as well take the small step of also jettisoning kana as well.

There's no good reason to move to the Roman alphabet as there are already 2 phonetic syllabaries, but reading Japanese text all in kana is excruciating. In fact, even Japanese braille references kanji. I can't see kanji being abolished any time soon, especially since it's not exactly a major burden for Japanese people to absorb kanji in Japan, where they're constantly surrounded by them.

Terrible idea. Kanji is what makes Japanese work. They contain a heavy amount of etymology, and once you learn them they're actually the most fluent and intuitive part of Japanese. They make Japanese easier; not harder.

In addition it can be said that Japanese containing both meaning and reading in script is a point of superiority. Other languages are incapable of this richness.

Also good article on this: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...cy-problem

[Zgarbas]

James736 Wrote:In fact, even Japanese braille references kanji.

Good point. JSL also uses a lot of kanji. I just can't see Japanese working without them =/.

You can argue that spoken Japanese doesn't use kanji, but I think it does; I visualise kanjis when I hear a word, and you'll notice that if you use an unusual/wrong word, the first thing Japanese people will ask you for is not its meaning, but the kanjis it uses, which leads me to believe that they do the same.

sholum Wrote:I had a debate like this with someone on YouTube; they claimed that since the Koreans successfully switched to hangul, that Japan should switch to using only kana. Their only argument was "it doesn't cause the Koreans problems"; just because they did it doesn't mean it works better (and Koreans still use hanja in some cases, though I haven't studied the language enough to say when they usually use them). Sure, you learn the writing system more quickly, but you lose most of the etymological connections, especially with 漢語, since the Japanese never 'updated' their pronunciations to imitate the newer Chinese readings and just took the new ones as they came.

It depends on how you define 'problems'. As a lifelong reader, I place an enormous value on books. Not just 'important literary works' but all kinds of fiction, memoir, biography, travelogue. All those things, all the books that you might call 'pleasure reading', are simply disappearing in Korea. Books written by the previous generation are unreadable (or at least difficult to read) for the current generation, and only a handful of 'significant' works are going to be transliterated to the new writing system.

Even with transliteration, older works are going to become more inaccessible. My understanding is that Korean had just as much of a homonym problem as Japanese has, and without Hanja to disambiguate, what's happening is simply an elimination of many homonyms from ordinary usage, replacing them with new words or previously rare synonyms. Languages naturally evolve, of course, but this is forcing rapid evolution just so that writing can be understood.

I feel like this would be absolutely terrible for Japanese, which is has an incredibly powerful writing scene. Considering the small size of the country, the amount of written works they are producing is just amazing. But a generation growing up without being able to read contemporary works isn't going to become writers or readers at any great rate in a new phonetic writing system. There's already quite a barrier to reading pre-war Japanese compared to modern Japanese. We're quite lucky in English that the last 200 years worth of writings are still entirely understandable, and even going back to the 17th century it only takes a few footnotes to be understandable.
Korean just introduced a barrier to accessing older works that is only comparable to go back nearly 1000 years in English; Japan already has drastic differences as you go back over the last couple centuries, but at least the writing systems are all based on the same kanji... get rid of those and only dedicated scholars will be reading anything from the past.

Anyway, I don't speak Korean or live there so my opinion about that is largely influenced by English-language editorials that I've read (and unfortunately don't have the links to anymore, having changed computers over the years.) The image of nearly deserted bookshops has stuck with me however. (Of course bookshops in the west are nearly deserted too now, but that's only because everyone gets e-books or overnight shipping now, not because book sales have plummeted. That's also a little sad in a nostalgic way but not at all the same tragedy that has occured in Korea.)

Of course, people who don't value pleasure reading as an important part of culture are perhaps going to think I'm a little crazy with this talk. However, I feel pleasure reading is important for many reasons - because it's an intellect-improving hobby, a contemporary cultural dialogue, and when it comes to older works, a window into the past. When you lose your literature, you lose an enormous amount of continuity of your culture and self-understanding of your culture. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

All that said, I think the debate with respect to Japan is largely irrelevant. The opinion of foreign learners of Japanese isn't going to have any impact at all, and I don't think the Japanese themselves have any widespread interest in removing the Kanji from Japanese. Judging by all the oddball Kanji I come across in my reading, I'd have to say if anything at least readers and writers of books seem to be in love with Kanji, including obscure ones and old forms that have modern simplified replacements.

Zgarbas Wrote:You can argue that spoken Japanese doesn't use kanji, but I think it does; I visualise kanjis when I hear a word, and you'll notice that if you use an unusual/wrong word, the first thing Japanese people will ask you for is not its meaning, but the kanjis it uses, which leads me to believe that they do the same.

They may, but that's because they study and are surrounded by them so much it becomes ingrained in them, and only then it becomes a useful tool. Japanese people who can speak fluently but who are illiterate (there are many overseas) don't do that.

James736 Wrote:There's no good reason to move to the Roman alphabet as there are already 2 phonetic syllabaries, but reading Japanese text all in kana is excruciating. In fact, even Japanese braille references kanji. I can't see kanji being abolished any time soon, especially since it's not exactly a major burden for Japanese people to absorb kanji in Japan, where they're constantly surrounded by them.

While I agree that kana only text is excruciating (one of the reasons I could never bring myself to read children's books in Japanese), some might argue the burden part. Part of language class in Japan is devoted to drilling new kanji at each grade level, which is time spent that could be utilized in other, arguably, more productive ways. In fact, this argument was presented as early as the late-Edo period:

前島密、「漢字御廃止之議」、1866年
Hisoka Maejima, "The Argument for Abolishing Kanji", 1866

「漢字を普通一般の教育上に廃することは素読習字即ち文字の形画呼音を暗記し之を書写するの術を得る為めに費す時間を節減仕候に付一般学年の童子には少くも三ケ年専門高上の学を脩むる者には五六乃至七八年の時間を節省せしむへく此節省し得へき時間を以て或は学問に或は興業殖産しよくさんに各其所望に任して用ひしめは勝て算すへからさるの利益なるは毫末疑を容れさる事と奉存侯」

I won’t translate verbatim, as I’m somewhat rusty at old-style Japanese like this, but the general gist is that not learning kanji saves time from studying, and that the time that would be spent on learning to read and write can be better applied to other studies and tasks.

Zgarbas Wrote:You can argue that spoken Japanese doesn't use kanji, but I think it does; I visualise kanjis when I hear a word, and you'll notice that if you use an unusual/wrong word, the first thing Japanese people will ask you for is not its meaning, but the kanjis it uses, which leads me to believe that they do the same.

I do this too, and oftentimes when I hear a word I don't know, I'll try to piece together the kanji in my head based on context, but I wonder how natural of a habit this is. I used to do it a lot more when I was studying in the USA, and my reading ability greatly outstripped my listening/speaking abilities, but after living in Japan for a few years, I've found I do this less and less, even though my kanji knowledge has also expanded by being here.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:Books written by the previous generation are unreadable (or at least difficult to read) for the current generation, and only a handful of 'significant' works are going to be transliterated to the new writing system.

As someone who reads a lot, too, this would be also be one of my biggest worries, although I wonder how many Japanese people actually do bother reading much by previous generations of authors.

Japanese is an ancient poorly evolved language. This occurred due to its isolation. Getting rid of kanji and replacing it with a phonetic language would make the language more efficient but that is only a bandaid to the problem.

It doesn't fix the homynoms as others have mentioned. It doesn't fix that Japanese takes more syllables to express an utterance than other languages and so on

If you only live an ordinary life, you could save kanjis, but you couldn't educate doctors or engineers any more. You can still learn it through foreign languages, but that will divide people and make society undemocratic.

Google tells me 拡張型心筋症 is Dilated cardiomyopathy. Learning that ひろがる can be written as 拡がる means learning the meaning of 拡, in other words, a component of a technical concept. Language is not only a tool to communicate but also a tool to maintain civilization. Considering that, I'm not sure which is effective in the long run.

juniperpansy Wrote:Japanese is an ancient poorly evolved language. This occurred due to its isolation. Getting rid of kanji and replacing it with a phonetic language would make the language more efficient but that is only a bandaid to the problem.

It doesn't fix the homynoms as others have mentioned. It doesn't fix that Japanese takes more syllables to express an utterance than other languages and so on

There actually apparently is a fringe position called 国語外国語化論 (argument for making the national language a foreign language). According to the linked Wikipedia page, the Meiji-era statesman Arinori Mori favored establishing English as the national language, and the author Naoya Shiga posited changing the national language to French.

Raulsen Wrote:While Chinese could probably get away with romanization due to tones (even though I personally don't think they would or should), with Japanese, the high number of homophones would render any perceived benefits of Kanji abolition useless.

Does anyone have any actual data to show that this is true, or is this just an assumption?

The real problem is that you can't use tone markers because japanese has pitch accent rather than being utterly tonal. Tone is phonemic, but different accents are totally different systems, yet still perfectly intelligible.

Sino-japonic vocabulary also makes it more difficult, because there are so very many characters that share common sounds. Without the characters as mental reference, the system would be nearly unintelligible. Pitch markers would alleviate some of the stress, but then a given morpheme's pitch properties would change dramatically depending on what other morphemes it's attached to just as a result of how japanese grammar works (in restricting the prosody).

I'm sure that a heavily simplified kanji system is theoretically possible (in terms of reducing the characters and even further simplifying the shapes) but I fail to see how the growing pains of transitioning to such a system would be better than keeping the current system. It's not even a gain for the distant future: just look at chinese. Totally unintelligible languages, shared writing system, mild intelligibility in the written format.

ryuudou Wrote:In addition it can be said that Japanese containing both meaning and reading in script is a point of superiority. Other languages are incapable of this richness.

Also good article on this: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...cy-problem

But do they really have meaning? Their supposed meaning is pretty much assigned arbitrarily to symbols that mean nothing in reality, you have to memorize that relationship one by one, for every single character (and even for countless compounds that don't mean what the sum of their parts imply.) You can do the same and assign meaning to groups of letters too, and then use them to form new compound words, which is what many languages that use alphabets do (some much better than others; English just doesn't do it well at all.)

Take some of the examples Khatzumoto gives in that long article:

Quote:A learner of Japanese, knowing 豚/“pig” and 肉/“meat”, now knows the correct word for 豚肉/”pork”, as well as half of 牛肉/“beef” and indeed any other animal meet (hmmm? Not so phonetic, are we?)

In Portuguese*: porco (pig) + carne (meat) = carne de porco (pork). Vaca (cow) + carne (meat) = carne de vaca ('beef', although "bife" in Portuguese refers to something more specific, it's not simply cow meat.) And so on, it's always carne (meat) + de (of) + <animal>. English tends to prefer shorter words but Portuguese doesn't necessarily, which is why it works better for this.

[* I'm just using Portuguese because I know it well and it does this kind of combination much better than English.]

And:

Quote:as well as “肉体”/“physical/of the flesh” as in “肉体関係”/”sexual relationship”/”relationship of the flesh”.

Now what's in 肉体関係 that really indicates what it means? You need to study each character and compound to really be able to infer it. Let's again compare it to how it's done in Portuguese: relacionamento sexual = relaciona(mento) + sex(ual), which anyone can read and understand. Or if you want to distinguish the equivalent of "particles" that we have, it would be relac[ionar] (to relate) + -mento (action) + sex- (sex) + -ual (adjective). Same thing, very clear for a minimally educated Portuguese speaker, and each of those parts can be seen in many other words, with the exact same meaning.

Finally:

Quote:With kanji, it’s like the veil of jargon is never allowed to fall; there is no iron curtain of terminology; everything is transparent.

That's not because of kanji, but because of the way words are formed by the specialists in each language. For example the word “Pithecanthrope” [猿(pithec)人(anthrope)] in that anecdote he quoted – there's nothing that really prevents people from calling it "ape man" in English just like in Japanese, it's just that the specialists prefer to use words with Greek roots rather than German ones or combining simple English words. But as I said, just because they don't do it well in English it doesn't mean it can't be done at all with an alphabet; a lot of clear meaning can be given with combinations of letters, just like with combinations of 'strokes', perhaps even more clearly if the language is well-prepared to do that.

juniperpansy Wrote:Japanese is an ancient poorly evolved language. ...
It doesn't fix the homynoms as others have mentioned. It doesn't fix that Japanese takes more syllables to express an utterance than other languages and so on

I don't see how Japanese is 'poorly evolved', although it is certainly -uniquely- evolved. Nor do I see how Japanese taking more syllables is a problem - it's a known fact that the fewer phonetic elements a language has, the more syllables it uses, and vice versa. Naturally, people speak faster when there are fewer phonetic elements to distinguish and slower when there are more phonetic elements to distinguish. Having more elements and speaking slower or having fewer elements and speaking faster aren't "problems", they're just differences.

patriciona Wrote:

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:Books written by the previous generation are unreadable (or at least difficult to read) for the current generation, and only a handful of 'significant' works are going to be transliterated to the new writing system.

As someone who reads a lot, too, this would be also be one of my biggest worries, although I wonder how many Japanese people actually do bother reading much by previous generations of authors.

I don't have any kind of numbers on this, but my feeling from consuming popular media and reading various blogs and so on, is that essentially everyone learns to read pre-war writing styles with the obsolete kana and strange kana usages, and everyone is at least exposed to the older kanji-only style where the characters aren't in the right order. Only advanced students really read much in that older out-of-order kanji style, and it's certainly not read for pleasure by any but the very geekiest enthusiasts. In short, the 'pre-war' style is known and slightly difficult to read, akin to reading Elizabethan English, while the older out-of-order-kanji style is obscure and hard to read, akin to reading Middle English (Chaucer, etc.).
It's hard to know exactly how much people read the older materials in their original form or in updated forms, but certainly everyone who is literate is -familiar- with all the classic literary works as well as all the traditional folktales. I've lost count of the number of times I've run into references (in very popularly consumable manga and light novels!) to traditional works that took forever for me to puzzle out.

gdaxeman Wrote:

ryuudou Wrote:In addition it can be said that Japanese containing both meaning and reading in script is a point of superiority. Other languages are incapable of this richness.

Also good article on this: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...cy-problem

But do they really have meaning? Their supposed meaning is pretty much assigned arbitrarily to symbols that mean nothing in reality, you have to memorize that relationship one by one, for every single character (and even for countless compounds that don't mean what the sum of their parts imply.) You can do the same and assign meaning to groups of letters too, and then use them to form new compound words, which is what many languages that use alphabets do (some much better than others; English just doesn't do it well at all.)

Take some of the examples Khatzumoto gives in that long article:

Quote:A learner of Japanese, knowing 豚/“pig” and 肉/“meat”, now knows the correct word for 豚肉/”pork”, as well as half of 牛肉/“beef” and indeed any other animal meet (hmmm? Not so phonetic, are we?)

In Portuguese*: porco (pig) + carne (meat) = carne de porco (pork). Vaca (cow) + carne (meat) = carne de vaca ('beef', although "bife" in Portuguese refers to something more specific, it's not simply cow meat.) And so on, it's always carne (meat) + de (of) + <animal>. English tends to prefer shorter words but Portuguese doesn't necessarily, which is why it works better for this.

[* I'm just using Portuguese because I know it well and it does this kind of combination much better than English.]

You could make the same argument for kana. Doesn't change that it's a comparative mess, and that you have to use multiple words and full sentences to get the same flexibility that Japanese gets on a per-word basis due to kanji.

gdaxeman Wrote:

Quote:as well as “肉体”/“physical/of the flesh” as in “肉体関係”/”sexual relationship”/”relationship of the flesh”.

Now what's in 肉体関係 that really indicates what it means? You need to study each character and compound to really be able to infer it. Let's again compare it to how it's done in Portuguese: relacionamento sexual = relaciona(mento) + sex(ual), which anyone can read and understand. Or if you want to distinguish the equivalent of "particles" that we have, it would be relac[ionar] (to relate) + -mento (action) + sex- (sex) + -ual (adjective). Same thing, very clear for a minimally educated Portuguese speaker, and each of those parts can be seen in many other words, with the exact same meaning.

You can also claim that にくたいかんけい infers meaning, but in the end にくたいかんけい
represent sounds and not meaning. Same thing with your Portuguese example.

If cannot read にくたいかんけい you will not know what it means. If you cannot read "relacionamento" you will not know what it means. If you cannot read 肉体関係 you'll still know what it means because the characters have meaning independent of pronunciation.

Portuguese, as well as any other language using the same script, is not like this. Latin characters are dry and completely meaningless in the same way the kana are.

gdaxeman Wrote:Finally:

Quote:With kanji, it’s like the veil of jargon is never allowed to fall; there is no iron curtain of terminology; everything is transparent.

That's not because of kanji, but because of the way words are formed by the specialists in each language. For example the word “Pithecanthrope” [猿(pithec)人(anthrope)] in that anecdote he quoted – there's nothing that really prevents people from calling it "ape man" in English just like in Japanese, it's just that the specialists prefer to use words with Greek roots rather than German ones or combining simple English words. But as I said, just because they don't do it well in English it doesn't mean it can't be done at all with an alphabet; a lot of clear meaning can be given with combinations of letters, just like with combinations of 'strokes', perhaps even more clearly if the language is well-prepared to do that.

Phonographic systems are a lot less flexible at this compared to logographic ones like Japanese. There's also no difference between pithecanthrope and apeman besides nuance. The reason you might understand one and not the other is because, again, latin script conveys no meaning.

Raulsen Wrote:The only way I could see the removal of Kanji "working" (even if it wasn't necessarily supported from a cultural standpoint) would be to introduce a system of "spelling" to help distinguish homonyms. Much in the same way English distinguishes between "bear" and "bare," Japanese could theoretically add a spelling system to distinguish words with the same pronunciation, but even then, such would almost guarantee a move away from Japanese's one-to-one system of phonetic representation via Kana.

The reason "bear" and "bare" are spelled differently isn't to help readers distinguish their meanings - to suggest so would imply that it's impossible to distinguish them in speech without making direct references to their spellings, and that's not even getting into the two unrelated meanings of "bear" ("grizzly bear" vs. "the right to bear arms"). The actual reason for the difference is that the two words used to be pronounced differently. There are a lot of distinctions in English that are no longer made in speech but are still preserved in writing. And the funniest part is that Japanese kana spelling used to work exactly like that before the post-war reforms. For example 後悔 and 航海, both written as こうかい in modern kana spelling, as well as having the same pitch accent, would have been written as こうくわい and かうかい, respectively. So in a way Japanese kana spelling rules have moved away from what you're suggesting, aside from a few marginal examples like the particles は and わ (both used to be は), the particle を vs. the prefix お and the particle へ vs. the noun 絵 (え; was written as ゑ under the old system). Modern schoolchildren do learn how those older spellings correspond to modern pronunciations, but as far as I know they aren't required to memorize all the words that used to be spelled differently, so re-introducing this spelling system would require re-educating most of the population from scratch.

Incidentally this need for re-education, or rather rendering the older education moot, is probably the biggest reason why nothing is going to change in the Japanese writing system. Both Vietnam and Korea had rather low hanzi literacy rates when their orthographic reforms kicked in, and so did mainland China when it went for simplification. While Japan's literacy rates at the time of the post-war reforms might be more arguable (here's at least one scholar who looked at the same kanji literacy survey that Khatzumoto brings up in his post, but ended up making pretty much the exact opposite conclusion), by now it's probably fair to say that the vast majority of the population is reasonably literate in the modern Japanese mixed writing system, while those who would stand to win from further simplification are perceived to be an insignificant minority.

ryuudou Wrote:You could make the same argument for kana. Doesn't change that it's a comparative mess, and that you have to use multiple words and full sentences to get the same flexibility that Japanese gets on a per-word basis due to kanji.

What would you say that it says though that a lot of the productive force in creating new Japanese words has moved away from kanji to using loanwords written in kana? For example, the Japanese decided to call a computer "コンピュータ" instead of "電脳", like the Chinese. They call convenience stores "コンビニ" instead of "便利店", once again the Chinese term. It seems like for many earlier inventions, a kanji term was coined, such as 電話 for telephone, or 自動車 for automobile, but increasingly this look like less and less the case. If the economy of meaning per character is such a selling point for kanji, why isn't it being used as much?