Fillanzea Wrote:Let's use the word "rape" to mean "rape," and not "adopting loanwords."

They are using it to mean "rape".

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/rape

definition 2 (noun): The wanton destruction or spoiling of a place.
definition 2 (verb): Spoil or destroy (a place)

ok, in this case the "place" is "the Japanese language", but still.

(also see the etymology note. The sexual rape meaning was even introduced later than the other meaning)

Sorry... this is a bugbear for me. Words are perfectly capable of having multiple meanings, you can find tons of other examples in the English language.

<some more smartarsery>
The Big French Vocab Import happened after the Norman Conquer, so in fact, the English language had been raped.

Betelgeuzah Wrote:would say that most finns like their culture but very few care about language purity (even though its a part of the culture) more than globalization which means abundance of English in language.

I would argue Finland is an extreme case. The average level of english ability there is far higher than most countries. It is also a far smaller country in the scheme of things and therefore more reliant on learning a de facto global language to participate in the global economy. That is just not true of the japanese though.

If the japanese want to reform their writing system/language, more power to them. They've done it several times in the past. I'll be happy to learn what they come up with, just like i've been happy to learn their current system. I want to learn japanese, which is the language the japanese use. Reforms proposed by gaijin are usually from a position of ignorant, ethnocentric arrogance (what? They have *four* alphabets? They should just use romaji. It's good enough for english so it should be good enough for them!!!11!). It's their language and their decision.

The major flaw i see with romaji is that it effectively also requires spaces to be readable (unless they wrote particles in capital letters or something like that). Unfortunately, spaces and japanese don't go so well together: it's simply not clear where they should go. Should particles be attached to the previous word, or separated by spaces on both sides? Expressions used as grammar like ”かもしれない”、should that be a single word or ”ka mo
shirenai"? "tabetakunai" or "tabetaku nai"? "tabetakunaru" or "tabetaku naru"? What's the romaji for ”食べたくなくなっちゃった”? "tabetakunakunacchatta"? "tabetakunaku nacchatta"? Seriously? This is better?

zigmonty Wrote:

kainzero Wrote:もういい！
Faakinで食べに行こう！

だってこの世にファッキンほどいいものないってば！

ファッキんの後、Pantsをはきます。そしてZubon。

zigmonty Wrote:The major flaw i see with romaji is that it effectively also requires spaces to be readable (unless they wrote particles in capital letters or something like that). Unfortunately, spaces and japanese don't go so well together: it's simply not clear where they should go. Should particles be attached to the previous word, or separated by spaces on both sides? Expressions used as grammar like ”かもしれない”、should that be a single word or ”ka mo
shirenai"? "tabetakunai" or "tabetaku nai"? "tabetakunaru" or "tabetaku naru"? What's the romaji for ”食べたくなくなっちゃった”? "tabetakunakunacchatta"? "tabetakunaku nacchatta"? Seriously? This is better?

I don't have a stake in this debate, but that's the major flaw? Japanese isn't the only agglutinative language in the world, and most of them have handled the issue by agreeing on some guidelines. Of course it was often done in an arbitrary manner: the phrase ジョンと一緒 can be translated into Kazakh as Джонмен бiрге, but the phrase ジョンとトム is written as Джон мен Том. Even non-agglutinative languages don't have a uniform solution: the word/particle "and" is written separately in most Indo-European languages but not in Semitic languages, even though both families are largely fusional. My point is that orthography and punctuation often have more to do with convention and tradition than with making grammatical sense, so if a need for spaces arises coming up with a set of rules shouldn't be too hard. After all, Koreans had to do just that when they switched to all-hangul writing, and they seem to be doing fine now (in fact, given the striking similarities between Korean and Japanese grammars, this could be a good model for a hypothetical spaced Japanese script).

vonPeterhof Wrote:I don't have a stake in this debate, but that's the major flaw?

Perhaps i should have said it's "a" major flaw. Another is that romaji instantly doubles the number of characters to represent each word over a kana representation, and more than doubles it for kanji. This exacerbates the problem of already long words due to agglutination. I *like* how dense japanese text is.

Other than that, surely romaji is equivalent to kana? The spaces issue is present in an all hiragana text too, and can be remedied as you say through convention. If you use ワープロローマ字 or that " ' after ん" scheme, then it 1-1 maps to kana. Surely the rest is just a matter of what you are used to?

My argument has been focused on asking "why?" more than stating "why not". I'm just seriously not convinced what the advantages are supposed to be. The reasons not to use romaji are fairly weak but, frankly, they're more substantial than the reasons *to* use romaji. Familiarity with the alphabet helping with english study? Really? There's all of 26 letters and they're not pronounced the same as romaji vs english anyway. I seriously doubt japanese people's struggle learning english is due to the alphabet itself, rather than the rest of the language. And this is all not considering the cost of conversion. Anyone proposing such a *massive* change requires a damn good argument. I believe this is why yudantaiteki says he's only "theoretically" in favour of transitioning to romaji.

I mostly say "theoretically" due to the practical difficulties in making such a change. However, I think it would be worth it in the long run due to the increase in literacy, increased ease in acquiring literacy, greater technological compatibility with other countries, and other benefits such as that.

Sorry to necro this contentious thread, but I just finished reading this book and I thought the final two paragraphs were somewhat apropos to this discussion:

Quote:<いろは>と<あいうえお>の両輪によって情緒と理論の言語的バランスを取ることができるこのような仕組みの言語は、日本語以外にはないだろう。あらゆる文化を吸収して新たな世界を世界を創成するというてんで、それは曼荼羅のようなものだと言えるかもしれない。
我々はそうした素晴らしい日本語の世界に生きているのである。

The Japanese language's history is built on absorbing words and concepts from other languages. As we all know, a humongous portion of Japanese vocabulary comes straight from Chinese, as do the kanji. We also all know the kana were in turn derived from kanji. So it's simply not true to say that the recent large influx of European loanwords has watered down or ruined (or raped) Japanese. That's just Japanese doing what it has always done - strengthening and reinforcing itself by taking on new words and concepts without forcing itself to produce come contrived equivalent based on pre-existing native words.
That process is completely different from removing entire scripts from the language to suit some arbitrary and unestablished notion of efficiency. All that would accomplish would be to throw away over 1000 years of linguistic heritage.