Only the first 7 of those are commonly used terms, though. But it's still a lot.


Absolutely. When people speak they can't see what's being said but can understand easily.


Only about 20% of Japanese words have pitch accent.


Not sure, but I'd guess that most Sino-Japanese words have homophones.


The homophones are found overwhelmingly in Sino-Japanese vocabulary because the Chinese language is morphologically monosyllabic. If you study Chinese you'll encounter the same issue of homophones but Chinese has the lexical tone which neither Korean nor Japanese have.

So why couldn't this work in writing?
Still helpful though, right?

Not sure, but I'd guess that most Sino-Japanese words have homophones.
That's along the lines of what I thought.

Doesn't Chinese have homophones with the same tone as well?

Wow, this thread exploded while I wasn't here.

Anyways, you all are missing one big reason why Japanese romaji doesn't work. It is because the Japanese language is full of syllables, not consonants. There are tons of words that would have only a single letter difference if they were written in romaji. In English if you make a typo for one letter, usually you'd be able to understand the word, but in Japanese if you make a typo - heck, even if you don't make a typo it is hard to read romaji because you need to pay attention to every little letter in order to catch what the whole word is.

The homophones stuff is bull actually. Japanese can (kinda) be used avoiding these homophones, which are all derived from Chinese. Spoken Japanese generally uses more "Japanese Japanese", while written Japanese generally can use more "Chinese Japanese". Writing the pitch accent would be mad though. I don't notice the pitch accent, I know it is there but I don't think about it, it just comes. Most people would have difficulty writing the pitch accent if they had to. That, and the pitch accent is different from the East and the West.

As for the writing system, yea, it is like that, and it isn't exactly ideal, but it is the best you can get I guess.

I personally believe that hangul could be adopted for use with Japanese though, and it could work out quite nicely. When I say adapted, I mean adapted though. You'd have to make a different orthography in order to let each Chinese Character take up one square. Here is an example of my idea:

*disclaimer* This system is far from perfect, and I'm just giving ideas of how it could work. I also haven't even thought about how "Japanese Japanese" would be written in this system, only "Chinese Japanese".

Kanji Hangul Kana Japanese Korean
正直 쇼짘 しょうじき shoujiki syojik
食卓 석탁 しょくたく shokutaku seoktak
限定 겐태 げんてい gentei gentae
発言 핬겐 はつげん hatsugen hatgen
発射 핬샤 はっしゃ hassha hatsya
発表 핬효 はっぴょう happyou hathyo

Hangul has more vowels than Japanese. You can use some of them as the long vowels, and some of the short vowels. In my example, ㅗ is the same as Japanese "ou" and ㅓ is the same as Japanese "o". Likewise, ㅔ is the same as Japanese "e" and ㅐ is the same as Japanese "ei".

Also, you need to put the second part of the character on the bottom, rather than making it written in two blocks like Japanese. Since hangul has more consonants, I can use ㄱ to mean a Japanese "ku" and ㅋ to mean a Japanese "ki". (At the end of a Chinese Character syllable.) In this example I'm using ㅆ to mean a Japanese "tsu".

I'm also trying to keep the spelling as morphophemic as possible. Even though 発射 is pronounced "hassha" and not "hatsusha", I'm still writing the ㅆ at the bottom because it is a part of the character. Readers will be expected to read it out loud as "hassha" even though there is a ㅆ at the bottom. This is the normal way Korean is written as well. However, the next word, you can see is "happyou". This pronunciation is changed quite a bit from "hatsuhyou" that would be read if you read it out normally. I'm still writing it as 핬효 though to keep the morphophemic spelling. Actually I'm still debating over this stuff. One big difference between Japanese and Korean is that in Japanese: h, b, and p are related, while in Korean ㅂ and ㅍ are not related to ㅎ. So using the ㅎ jamo in Japanese is a bit odd. I'll think of a better way to do this one day. I could use ㅍ to represent the h sound in Japanese, but this would drive people who know Korean mad. So the current plan is to make ㅎ related to ㅂ and ㅃ, and not use ㅍ at all.

Uhh, wow. Sorry I hijacked this thread.

Those comments totally remind me of:


Mandarin is more disyllabic than you think.

I believe it could. In it's purest forum, written language is nothing more than a phonetic (or at least phonemic) rendering of the spoken language, right?
But, the Japanese language has always been written with Chinese characters. I don't think they're ready to abandon them yet although I believe a day will come when Japanese is written only in kana.


Yes. But when morphemes are combined together to make lexical units the choices are fewer, especially when you factor in the sandhi.
To give an idea of the homophones for Chinese versus Japanese consider this: if I type yi, a syllable with the most homophones (I think), in my Chinese IME I get 75 possibilities, and that's for all tones. If I type kou in my Japanese IME with the "bias for speech" turned on, I get 101 possibilities. Now here's the fun part. If I turn on the "bias for names" I get 457 possibilities. 457!


Even native Japanese has lots of homophones. Take miru. This could be <見る> (to see; to look; to watch, etc), it could be <診る> (to examine medically; to look over/on), it could be <看る> (to look after; to take care of), or it could be <観る> (to view, as in flowers or a movie).
Another example is with horu. It could be <彫る> (to carve; to engrave; to sculpt, etc), it could be <ほる> (to tattoo), or it could be <掘る> (to dig or excavate).


I doubt that any Japanese people (aside from the Zainichi Koreans) would be too keen on writing their language with a script invented by a Korean king.

This may be true, but we were talking about ways to reform Japanese's writing system which already exists, not adopting a new one (Romaji).
Maybe, but with official support more could be done. The PRC was able to switch over to simplified characters; why couldn't Japan start phasing out kanji with the aim of writing solely in kana? It wouldn't even have to be obligatory.

Do you know of any Japanese which is written in kana only?

No, I like to think of those as being all the same words. The original Japanese word has a wider meaning than the kanji used to write them, and people use different kanji to write the same word depending on its application.

Take a look at miru, most of those so called "homophones" are all around the same thing, the word generally has to do with looking.

While I think there are a few homophones in native Japanese, none come up to my mind at the moment, and it is much easier to distinguish them by context than with Chinese borrowed words.



XD. Yea, that's the only problem.



Yes. Classic games were often kana only because they couldn't handle kanji back then. Most kids books are also in kana.

If you are interested in kana only texts you might want to take a look at this site: http://www1.ocn.ne.jp/~kanamozi/

I'm sure they could. But, they have no intention of doing so. And I, personally, like having kanji.


OK, you're probably right about that one.


How about kiru? There's <切る> (to cut or sever) but there's also <着る> (to wear or put on).
I got another one: iru. That could be <居る> (to be or exist; stay), <鋳る> (to cast or mint), or <射る> (to shoot), <入る> (to get/go in), or <要る> (to need).
Those can't just be the same verb, right?

I suppose they don't intend to, but I'm just curious why. Many countries have initiated language reforms in the past century, including those with less complicated orthographies.

I guess it's the same situation as English, where history matters more than practicality.

Well, I for one like English spelling. Spelling reform would make me very sad.

And Japan /has had/ lots of reform.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical ... rthography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABjitai

Here is an example of old spelling with old letters from the book "Wagahai wa Neko de Aru":



And here is the new version:





Well, most of these are easy to distinguish when speaking with the context, so they aren't really needed. I've never heard of 鋳るor 入る before either, (Well, I know 入れる, so I guess I knew that 入る is a form of that verb, but I have never used or heard anyone use 入る in my memory.) and 居る and 要る are the only two that are commonly used. Also they are conjugated in a different way so you can tell the difference. (Same with the two きる) In fact in writing it is acceptable to not use kanji for those two いる.

Ahh, I felt something in the back of my head. I remember someone talking about about the way people don't write as much kanji and how much trouble it causes. Who cited this sentance:

「才能が有る或る若手社員が或る要職に在る」

Nowadays since not many people write kanji for ある, it would come up like this:

「才能があるある若手社員がある要職にある」

Which is confusing.

But other than things like that it is generally possible to distinguish words like these from context so it isn't much of a problem. I'm not saying kanji shouldn't be used for these words though. Kanji is a very useful visual aid, and it helps to read faster. When you listen, you hear as fast as the speaker, which is usually fast enough, but reading works completely in kana is more difficult.

Source: http://www.sekitechnologies.com/blog200 ... 60000.html