I'm kind of tired of arguing this too; if people want to believe that kanji is necessary because of homophones and that kanji/kana being used is proof that they're the best system of writing for Japanese, it doesn't really matter to me. I'm certainly not going to participate in a debate with someone who has already labelled my position as "profoundly stupid" and "exceptionally silly", and said that I know zero about linguistics and don't understand the Japanese sound system. When people start throwing around insults before even hearing the opposite side, there's no possibility of actual discussion or debate. I'm not sure I understand why this issue always engenders such hostility, though.

@nadiatims - I'm referring to how the brain processes kanji as icons, once invested with meaning through study, with stronger and more direct activations and associations with semantic content. Logographs such as kanji cover the text→meaning aspect of reading in a superior way to phonographic elements. This is useful, used as a complement alongside those same elements such as kana and ローマ字, and more in line with how language and cognition function in an emergent, embodied, multimodal fashion, including reading itself as a kludgy system that recruits relevantly mapped areas of the brain as literacy ensues. See the ‘how the brain processes kanji’ thread for links on the research that supports this view.

I won't claim anyone else has put together all the research as I have, but every point I make as a basis for the framework I present has clear roots and evidence in support of it. That doesn't mean that Japanese itself, the situation on the ground, as it were, is superior to English. There are many social and systematic issues that need to be resolved and make comparison problematic and undesirable, I feel.

But I do have an ideal that arises from my readings: a mixed logographic/phonographic system. And likewise there's another puzzle piece that only just now is gathering research. I'd given up on this cryptic area I refer to as my own speculations, but I'm happy to see I'll soon be able to refine my ideas with empirical results.

I haven't insulted you, but I disagree, care to explain your position?
I'm sure you could get by without kanji despite all of the homophones, but I believe kanji makes it a *lot* easier.

It isn't very difficult to prove either, just sit down and try and read a long text in kana, or romaji if you like, it's a complete pain in the arse, one of my Japanese friends once said to me: "It takes as long as trying to read an English text." I'm sure if you added spacing it would make it a bit easier, but not much.

I don't really have an argument either way. My only thought is that I'd be very annoyed if the writing system I'd been using all my life was changed.

Javizy Wrote:Do you mean switch over to Romaji? I've read one or two arguments for that. I can't imagine why anybody would make an argument for using hiragana only. They're both impossibly hard to read, so that's probably the best reason to keep kanji.

it's actually harder to read in kana only then full kanji or even kanjified sentences. Kana only is deadly harder. But not much people would know this if they haven't gotten into studying kanji

The proof for me is in the pudding. Once you've learned a large chunk of kanji, have you ever tried going to straight kana? It's like putting a brick on the brake peddle of reading. All the video game translators I know have the same problem and I have heard a lot of Japanese prefer Kanji to straight kana, especially in the age of computers where complex kanji can be written in less than a single second.

I think it helps in accepting Kanji to think of each Kanji has an individual word, not a writing system. You use different 'words' to build a new 'word' not unlike English, you just use radicals instead of chunks of words. You wouldn't consider knowing 2000+ words in English and how to pronounce each one of them very difficult if it's your native langauge, would you?

KMDES Wrote:All the video game translators I know have the same problem and I have heard a lot of Japanese prefer Kanji to straight kana, especially in the age of computers where complex kanji can be written in less than a single second.

This. Ugh, I picked up Mother 3 because I heard it was in all kana, assuming that would be easier to read/play.

After an hour or two I switched to Chrono Trigger, which uses a perfect ratio of kanji to kana. Much nicer to have kanji in the mix!

However, we are used to kanji because we use kanji.

If we always used kana or roomaji and never ever used kanji, would it still be difficult to read?

Food for thought...

kainzero Wrote:However, we are used to kanji because we use kanji.

If we always used kana or roomaji and never ever used kanji, would it still be difficult to read?

Food for thought...

It would be as we aren't used to Kanji. I don't think either of us would be considered native speakers of Japanese and we probably both use English which acts more like kana, so we should be more used to kana than Kanji. Are exposure to kanji in our daily lives is much less than people who live in Japan.

When I see discussions like this one, I always feel like chiming in with my pro-alphabet views. I'm a firm believer that learning to read your native language should take no more than a week, and should be done with fluency (within the students' vocabulary limits, of course) within six months through no more practice than casual or curricular reading (as is generally the case with kids in Finland, where they have probably the most consistent and simple orthography), otherwise something is wrong, most likely with the orthography or writing system itself. If there is any advantage to kanji in terms of reading speed or ease (which I doubt, seeing how most of the world seems to manage just fine with alphabetic writing systems, and reading speed seems to have more to do with reading style and practice), I don't think it offsets the massive amount of work that goes into learning to use it. At current, the only reason I see to learn kanji, is because of the simple fact that it is used in Japan to the exclusion of other systems, and if you want to be able to read Japanese, you have to be able to read kanji. This, however, has got nothing to do with the merits of kanji+kana as a writing paradigm. It's tradition. That's it.

As for the whole homonym conundrum, I'd say kanji caused it in the first place through word coining run rampant using kanji without regard for their readings (and thus their use in the spoken language).

There's no reason to defend a writing system religiously just because you happen to like it.

For some more scholarly (and some not so scholarly) writings on the subject of Chinese characters and romanization, and not just my personal opinions, I suggest everyone to have a look at http://www.pinyin.info and its readings section: http://www.pinyin.info/readings/list.html

Thora Wrote:erlog,
There are valid arguments on both sides of the debate. It really just comes down to an individual's assessment of the advantages/disadvantages and the feasibility of reform.

Also, I think those in favour of reducing or abolishing kanji were more concerned with general literacy, the burden on students and Japan's communication with the world, than any nationalistic desire to shake off Chinese influences. They wanted to switch to romaji after all.

Everything I've read points to the fact that one of the reasons for the high literacy rate in Japan is specifically because they've split pronunciation from meaning. As well, the problem of confusion without kanji comes up everyday on the Japanese news when they subtitle anyone giving a quote in order to provide the proper contextual meaning to what they're saying. They wouldn't do that if it were less confusing the other way 'round.

nadiatims Wrote:@nestor:
Kanji aren't necessarily all that much more semantic than syllables in English or any other language written with the Roman alphabet. The syllables in English words carry semantic information too. If a japanese word has a sanzui in it we can guess it has a liquid related meaning, but to do that, we have to first know the meaning of the sanzui radical. Likewise we can guess at the meaning of English words containing 'aqua', 'hydro' or 'marine'. We recognise these word fragments as carrying meaning in their own right.
Why is 同音語 more guessable that homo(same)phone(sound)?

The english sound system provides for many many more phonemes because of the way consonants and vowels are split and can be recombined. The paucity of phonemes in Japanese means that yes the individual kanji can be compared to individual word parts, but the syllables themselves really can't.

The idea isn't that 同意語 is more guessable than "homophone." The idea is that 同意語 is far more easily parsed and less confusing than just どういご written in kana. I understand you were responding to nestor, but your post provides a good opportunity for me to illustrate exactly why I think kanji are indispensable to the Japanese language.

どう could have any number of different meanings, い can mean sound or stomach or a whole host of other things, and the same goes for ご. As well, with kana you have the problem of breaking up syllables as well as breaking up words. There would essentially need to be 3 separate kinds of spacing to do kana-only. There would need to be spacing between letters(already exists), then spacing between distinct syllables, and then spacing between words. Because seeing the kana phrase どういご you really have no idea whether or not you should be taking ど as 土 or with the う as 堂 or 銅 or 道 or 同 or 動 or 同.

The fact that there are far fewer kinds of syllables and and phoneme phrases in Japanese makes it so that individual syllables and phoneme phrases cannot have easily discernible meanings like you're comparing them to in English. The kanji are what map to roman and greek word etymological word parts. The Japanese syllables don't map that way because of the ridiculous number of homophones.

"phon" in English has only 1 or 2 different meanings. どう or い or any other combination of phonemes in Japanese have tens of meanings that are most easily distinguished through the use of kanji. This is also ignoring the obvious point that there exist a great many kanji compounds that mean basically the same thing, have exactly the same pronunciation, but have very subtly different meanings because of the kanji the author chose to use in writing them.

To advocate for the removal of kanji from the Japanese language is to literally advocate for the removal of many different kinds of meaning that can not be replicated in Japanese without the use of Kanji.

You may as well advocate that Japan just adopt English as its native language because as long as the Japanese sound system is as restricted as it is, something like kanji that helps distinguish meaning between homophones will always be necessary. If you look at the other countries that have stopped using kanji I think you will find that they tend to have many more phonemes to work with than spoken Japanese tends to.

erlog Wrote:As well, the problem of confusion without kanji comes up everyday on the Japanese news when they subtitle anyone giving a quote in order to provide the proper contextual meaning to what they're saying. They wouldn't do that if it were less confusing the other way 'round.

Just want to point out that while news subs can be useful to anyone for various reasons, this is not necessarily why subs are being used.
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...4#pid70324

We should drop whatever language we were born into or learning and just all learn Esperanto.

I mean, if we're just gonna try and make every other language as 'English' as possible we might as well skip that step and go straight for Esperanto.

If the Japanese want no kanji or less Kanji, they'll do it themselves.

Whoa whoa whoa, are people really arguing that Japanese cannot be written with kanji? That's ludicrous. I'm not a proponent of abandoning kanji, just the opposite, I like the current system. But writing in kana/rōmaji is completely feasible and possible.

Consider this: do characters exist in speech? No, of course not. But Japanese speakers have no problems with homophones when speaking. Why, then would they have problems with homophones when writing? Maybe, pitch accents make speech slightly less homophonous, but all you need to remedy that is to add a diacritic.

What about Chinese, a language with even more homophones than Japanese? Surely nobody could write that in anything except Chinese characters, right? Nope. There exist several non-character based writing systems, e.g., Pe̍h-ōe-jī, the former writing system of Taiwanese. Dungan Chinese, written in Cyrillic. It, and many other Chinese languages, were also once written in an Arabic script.

Finally, consider Korean, which changed its writing system and doesn't have any problems, despite being similar to Japanese.

nest0r Wrote:I believe SignWriting could be thought of as a logographic system with certain advantages for deaf learners over an orthography and teaching system more heavily based on grapheme to phoneme mapping.

No, SignWriting definitely not logographic. It represents the "sounds", signs, of sign language, just like any other alphabetic writing system. Simply because it uses pictures doesn't make it logographic.

IceCream Wrote:But with sign writing, each individual component of the sign represents a particular action. The sign as a whole will represent a set of movements, proprioceptive information, etc.

I still don't see what you mean. You're saying that writing -> sound -> semantic meaning, but I don't see why the same thing won't happen with SignWriting (writing -> sign -> semantic meaning). You seem to be arguing otherwise?

Except one thing that happens a lot in speech is misunderstanding. Heck, it's a running gag in anime that someone says something they think they mean something because a homophone was used. (See just about every episode in School Rumble)It wouldn't be such standard humour if it didn't happen all the time.

Chinese also has a tone based system for speaking which I imagine is quite important for homophones.

cntrational Wrote:

IceCream Wrote:But with sign writing, each individual component of the sign represents a particular action. The sign as a whole will represent a set of movements, proprioceptive information, etc.

I still don't see what you mean. You're saying that writing -> sound -> semantic meaning, but I don't see why the same thing won't happen with SignWriting (writing -> sign -> semantic meaning). You seem to be arguing otherwise?

...no, that's exactly what i was saying...?
We were talking about people who are deaf, right? The whole point was that SignWriting could be easier for deaf people to learn. (did you think i was arguing that it was better in general?)
When a deaf person learns to read english, they have to learn that a particular collection of letters represents a semantic meaning without the "sound" to help. Or they have to represent that collection of letters as an action in their mind and then move to semantic meaning. Neither of which is a direct link in the way that SignWriting gives...

EDIT: Also... there are examples in japanese where meaning is simplified in speech, but not when reading... like 青い・蒼い　合う・遭う・逢う etc. The general meaning is enough for speech, but kanji allows for more catergorisation of shades of meaning in writing. It's not possible to preserve these if a phonetic writing system were used, new words would have to be invented.

KMDES Wrote:Except one thing that happens a lot in speech is misunderstanding. Heck, it's a running gag in anime that someone says something they think they mean something because a homophone was used. (See just about every episode in School Rumble)It wouldn't be such standard humour if it didn't happen all the time.

They're jokes. The joke cannot be gotten if the Japanese viewer was not aware of both meanings and which was the correct interpretation. So that's not really indicative of actual ambiguity.

Do note that I'm not saying that it wouldn't be more ambiguous without kanji, but that would not make it impossible to use Japanese.

Quote:Chinese also has a tone based system for speaking which I imagine is quite important for homophones.

Chinese has several homophones even with tone.

IceCream Wrote:...no, that's exactly what i was saying...?
We were talking about people who are deaf, right? The whole point was that SignWriting could be easier for deaf people to learn. (did you think i was arguing that it was better in general?)
When a deaf person learns to read english, they have to learn that a particular collection of letters represents a semantic meaning without the "sound" to help. Or they have to represent that collection of letters as an action in their mind and then move to semantic meaning. Neither of which is a direct link in the way that SignWriting gives...

I'm not sure what we're arguing about any more.

lol me neither

cntrational Wrote:

KMDES Wrote:Except one thing that happens a lot in speech is misunderstanding. Heck, it's a running gag in anime that someone says something they think they mean something because a homophone was used. (See just about every episode in School Rumble)It wouldn't be such standard humour if it didn't happen all the time.

They're jokes. The joke cannot be gotten if the Japanese viewer was not aware of both meanings and which was the correct interpretation. So that's not really indicative of actual ambiguity.

Do note that I'm not saying that it wouldn't be more ambiguous without kanji, but that would not make it impossible to use Japanese.

Quote:Chinese also has a tone based system for speaking which I imagine is quite important for homophones.

Chinese has several homophones even with tone.

Except the jokes are explained when they are done, either by showing what one character thought and what the other character thought, or through the actions of misinterpretations. It's them basically having to explain the joke.

This why context is important as without the context it would just make you go 'Huh?' Of course Japanese is a language that loves to leave the context as non-verbal.

IceCream Wrote:lol me neither

Ditto.

Fair enough. Context is very important, you can't disambiguate most of the homophones otherwise.

so uh

is the house of representatives a real house?

what if they have a party and they bring down the house of representatives?

kainzero Wrote:so uh

is the house of representatives a real house?

what if they have a party and they bring down the house of representatives?

Then they'll have to fight, for their right, to party.

I don't believe that kanji "separate meaning from pronunciation" when reading at speed. I think there's evidence that the kanji are processed for sound in that situation. I agree that kana-only texts are very hard to read, but I think that's because they don't have the distinguishing characteristics that have been added to the alphabet over time. The alphabet has had a huge amount of tuning done to it to improve legibility. Try reading an old Latin or all-capital text sometime for another true way to get a headache.

As far as the alleged high Japanese literacy rate, I am skeptical that it's accurate. The Japanese government invents a lot of those statistics.

I agree that Japanese would be fine written phonetically with a well-designed set of characters. The homophones are okay in speech, so they should be okay in the written language in general. That doesn't mean that the language wouldn't evolve, though. Personally, I don't much care about this issue since the situation isn't going to change.

I think it was the American government who found out about the high literacy rates when they figured they'd abolish kanji becasue 'Well even the natives can't even read their own damn langauge! I think Douglas MacArthur made a quote about it too, but I can't remember where I can find it.

Also, ever try to translate kana text with no context?