What I've been doing is learning the kanji form of words on the chance that if I do encounter them then I know what they mean. I'm not doing it for my active knowledge, but passive knowledge. Let's face it, I've seen 睨む much more often than みらむ, so it's worth it for me to know it as a vocabulary word even though I'm not actively practicing the writing or recognition of it with my RTK deck.

Same goes with kanji forms of more common words that do show up. It's limiting to say "oh, you won't use that" when the actual case is "you won't use it, but you have a good chance to see it". I still try to mark them "UK" as a reminder not to be too quick on the IME with them.

Anyway, back to studying.

I'm going to completely disagree with you Aijin. Japanese is already complex enough to learn as it is. There is no need to make it more complex by reintroducing old forms of characters and rare kanji variants of simple words. 何處 is not even listed in any of my dictionaries. Beautiful literature can be written, and has been written using only kana. Please, no more kanji! There is also value in making a language more accessible.

Last edited by Transparent_Aluminium (2009 December 01, 2:33 pm)

Transparent_Aluminium wrote:

Please, no more kanji!

Says Mr. Transparent-Light-Silver.  I haven't actually checked the really big authoritative
dictionaries (not having access to any), but I'm pretty sure that's a new character...

I don't think fewer characters makes the language much more accessible.  Something like 匂い is a bit easier to learn than におい in my opinion, especially if it helps break up what would otherwise be kana-soup.

As Aijin implied in her post, there is a certain similarity between kanjification and stronger vocabulary in that they give you a power to control shades in nuance. They also share weakness as well; fewer kanji/vocabulary could lead to simplified, rough communication to a degree. But at the same time if you overuse them, it will make your writing pretentious and less accessible.

So while it's a matter of preference, I think a good writing style is simple and succinct, and saves obscure kanjification/words for when they're definitely necessary to carry your idea. Sometimes you may have to expect a reader to use a dictionary to understand your writing, but I think unnecessarily difficult text is as ambiguous as overly simplified writing.

Your incredibly strong vocabulary can only impress stupids and confuses a lot of people regardless of content. But your simple writing can impress everyone from the dumbest guy to professors.

That said, I know it's not unusual for us to get obsessed with fancy cosmetic stuff such as beautiful fonts, OS skins, blog designs, fancy furniture, and obscure vocabulary and kanji. But they're usually passing fads. Most of us find a balance between practicality and aesthetics.

I think a person who overuses obscure words/kanji is the same as a kid who always uses dirty slang regardless of context and situation. Actually offensive words and a pretentious vocabulary are strikingly similar in the sense that they're not supposed to be used in a normal situation. Both are necessary when you want to effectively offend others, too. I guess it's kind of important to learn them, but I think it's a good idea to avoid them unless they're absolutely necessary. If you don't know them, you don't understand what people are saying and look like a stupid. If you use them in the wrong situation, people may misunderstand you.

I think every language should be immediately overhauled according to a universal standard for total efficiency in every situation, each context indexed and assigned a limited set of variables for deviation from the universal standard. Anyone who fails to adhere to the prescribed usage must be ostracized by omniscient language police as vulgar children.

So, let's begin. The standard is... the possible situations are.... the variables are... (please replace ellipses, as I seem unable to do so myself... be sure to always cite your references for each point!)

I know there will be naysayers comrades, but don't listen to them. They want you to think that the only alternative to this is to speak prescriptively without definitively filling in those blanks, simply aspiring to authoritative tones by rigidly staticizing arbitrary standards and reacting to those, or perhaps they will radically declare that purely bottom-up, self-organizing chaos is required, because no one can ever analyze and describe usage from a meta perspective and develop common reference points to deviate from, allowing for both flexibility and efficiency.

There is no other way, however. Resistance is futile, you will be reformed.

yudantaiteki wrote:

Overhauling language and overhauling a writing system are different things, though.

I disagree, I think it's all of a whole, and if you truly wish to reform any component of language, you need to be flexible and gradual about it, factoring in the whole, or you must find a true reference point in the 'great outdoors' to escape the endogeneity trap. I think the latter is impossible, and the former requires something balanced and evolutionarily minded.

yudantaiteki wrote:

Aijin wrote:

by not using kanji forms, they're threatened by extinction

This is supposed to be a bad thing?

It won't affect the vast majority people, but since I have a great love of language, it is rather depressing to me.

I've seen this claim a lot, but I've never seen it supported by actual quotations from literature that show kanji presenting extra nuance that would not be conveyed if kana were used instead.  I think the claim is especially suspect because when you look at authors like Soseki and Akutagawa, modern editions make many changes in their kanji usage to conform to contemporary style.

I believe I've given a few simple examples in the path, but unfortunately I don't really have access to my mini-library of books in California, so I can't provide you with specific quotations, book titles, authors, etc. However, I can explain to you the gist of it, especially in regards to novels written in the point-of-view style, which I find it to be most effective:

When a character's point-of-view is taken, the prose itself should reflect the character, and many Japanese authors use the variations of writing to establish this characterization. In a novel that I read, the story chronicled a man's entire life, starting from his childhood. In the earlier chapters, as it took the young boy's point of view, it used very simple language, mostly hiragana, etc, to examplify his youth and lack of knowledge. As the story progresses and the protagonist gains both age and education, more complicated grammatical structures, and kanji begin to be used in the prose. During the time the character is a scholar, rarer kanji forms gradually replace the mundane aspects of his vocabulary, to reflect his own mental evolution.

In stories with multiple points-of-view, authors also have the ability to give more distinction between the various characters by using different writing styles in their characterization. For example, if a character was from the older generation, traditional kanji forms would be used in the prose for their chapters, as well as more traditional speech. In the chapters of the younger characters, 全然 would be used in positive sentences, since that has become much more common lately, in comparison to the older character's chapters, where 全然 would only be used in negative constructions. Though that's more an example of grammar rather than kanji forms to reflect characterization. But in the older character's prose, 何處 would be used rather than どこ, to use my earlier example. Etc.

The reason this is important, is that it's a characteristic that is quite unique to Japanese. In English if you want to create differences in the prose written for different points-of-view, you're limited to the vocabulary and grammar itself, whereas Japanese presents the extra dimension of expression through its use of multiple ways of writing a single thing.

Many modern authors obviously don't use these techniques, since accessibility is necessary for profit. But when reading works of truly talented writers, keep an eye out for how they use different forms for different characters and situations.

掛詞 is a device in poetry, which was often spoken (in addition to written, though written in kana) -- the dual meanings those words have are present in the spoken language, not added through written symbols.

I'm not sure what you're talking about here...掛詞 when written, use 平仮名 and 片仮名 so that it is vague and can establish dual meanings within a single word. If there were not multiple writing systems in Japanese, this simply wouldn't be possibly. In Mandarin, there are an insane amount of homonyms, yet one cannot use this technique because the language is limited to 汉字.

何處 is not even listed in any of my dictionaries. Beautiful literature can be written, and has been written using only kana. Please, no more kanji! There is also value in making a language more accessible.

I suppose I didn't really consider it from a foreigner's perspective. 處 is simply the traditional character for 処, and even if a Japanese person isn't familiar with it, they'll recognize that 何處 is 何処 simply because 処 is a component to the original character, and most Japanese don't have much trouble realizing the traditional characters when they have a context. Modern dictionaries won't have entries for all the variations of the original characters (they'll have 中国 but not 中國; 奨学金 but not 奬學金, for example)  but if you look at a dictionary from the 50s or prior, or any literature published back then, those variations are the norm rather than the exception. It's important to be able to read these things, because not everything has been republished for the more simplified language that has come into use recently.

So while it's a matter of preference, I think a good writing style is simple and succinct, and saves obscure kanjification/words for when they're definitely necessary to carry your idea. Sometimes you may have to expect a reader to use a dictionary to understand your writing, but I think unnecessarily difficult text is as ambiguous as overly simplified writing.

Oh, I agree 100%. Using too much rare vocabulary, kanji forms, etc, just makes it very difficult to grasp for others. And since conveying ideas, etc, is the purpose of language in the first place, what use is it when nobody can understand you because it's so arcane? But at the same time, sometimes one can't settle for simpler vocabulary, because it doesn't express the nuances of meaning that the more common words can use. And in those cases, it's best to just simply use it and make people use a dictionary, as that way you'll get your meaning across, rather than settling for conveying something less precise.

And at the very least, it's important to recognize things. The average Japanese person now adays can't even write 薔薇, since they are never going to handwrite it often enough to bother learning the kanji, but at least everyone can read it.

Balance is the key to everything in life I guess

Last edited by Aijin (2009 December 01, 9:33 pm)

Y... wrote:

They're fundamentally different because...

Interestingly, they've attributed some changes in languages to changes in its written form.  Also, writing changes as a side effect of other changes in technology and policy.

btw - I don't think ruiner was suggesting that language change and writing change are identical, but that they are interdependent ("it's all of a whole"). I think the other point was any deliberate change should take into account that interdependence and be gradual (ie a perceived "ought" rather than an "it has never/cannot been done"). The lack of objective and agreed criteria for change that ruiner mentions may have included non-language criteria (political reasons). So... I think you two are having a virtual disagreement.  :-)

harhol - lol

edit: added quote

Last edited by Thora (2009 December 01, 10:24 pm)

wildweathel wrote:

Says Mr. Transparent-Light-Silver.  I haven't actually checked the really big authoritative
dictionaries (not having access to any), but I'm pretty sure that's a new character...

It's supposed to be read as three separate characters: 透軽銀, i.e. Transparent Aluminium.

magamo wrote:

A small number of powerful people can destroy the local language if they want regardless of the speakers' will. Maybe negative changes like death isn't a change in your definition?

I think that languages can influence / overtake each other but it's much harder for a small group of people, like a government, to influence the language as a whole. There might be an exception in the case of a conquest where the citizens are forced to abandon their language.

Last edited by Transparent_Aluminium (2009 December 01, 11:10 pm)

Transparent_Aluminium wrote:

magamo wrote:

A small number of powerful people can destroy the local language if they want regardless of the speakers' will. Maybe negative changes like death isn't a change in your definition?

I think that languages can influence / overtake each other but it's much harder for a small group of people, like a government, to influence the language as a whole. There might be an exception in the case of a conquest where the citizens are forced to abandon their language.

Hmm. But there can be positive tweaks as well. For example, minorities in some countries managed to change the local language so that it's a social faux pas to use certain derogatory words/phrases that had been used frequently by the majority. Those words may still be used by extremists and ignorant people, but I think the minorities fought, won, and changed the language.

Well, whether it's good or bad is a matter of opinion, I guess. Anyway, the point is that it's possible to deliberately change or even kill a language regardless of whether it's spoken or written language.

Thora wrote:

I don't think ruiner was suggesting that language change and writing change are identical, but that they are interdependent

But that's not really true either; if you look at drastic changes like switching to Hangul or roman letters (in Vietnam, for instance), those were not accompanied by equally drastic changes in the spoken languages.  The vast majority of people communicate orally a lot more often than they read or write, which necessarily means that the impact of a writing system on a language is limited, and may take several generations to really manifest itself.

ruiner wrote:

There's also that I have a different conception of 'writing' than some. I don't view its role to be secondary, subordinate to phonetics, a mule for meaning, or somesuch.

A writing system cannot exist independent of a spoken language, or without carrying phonetic information from a spoken language.  The only reason we can communicate with these symbols we're typing right now is that we know how to interpret them to connect to a language that we both speak.  A language, however, can (and often does) exist with no written form.

(EDIT: I'm not saying here that writing must be 100% a reflection of speech, just that the degree to which writing can diverge from speech is limited.)

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2009 December 02, 7:50 am)

Yes, but the writing is still representing some spoken language, just not the current vernacular.  That kind of situation occurs in a lot of cultures where there is a tiny percentage of literate people who can learn any sort of writing, no matter how complex or how divorced from their own spoken language.  I did not mean to imply that a writing had to represent the current vernacular spoken language, just that it has to represent some language that was spoken at some time.  The more that writing diverges from current speech, the harder it is for native speakers to learn, but if you're talking about a rich elite with a lot of time, it doesn't matter that much.

(Although this wasn't true for all of Japanese history, I think the majority opinion is that the language of the Tale of Genji (for instance) is pretty close to what the spoken language would have been at the time.)

Classical Chinese is probably the best example I know of of a form of writing that diverged from speech in a rather extreme manner.  Probably not all classical Chinese is like this, but there definitely is some (particularly poetry) that does not directly represent any spoken language that ever existed, but rather used a combination of language elements and the visual appearance of the characters to create meaning.  Now, I think the degree of divergence is still pretty small in the grand scheme of things (because a lot of it simply involves abbreviated forms of words), but it's still more than you usually see.