Re: tlug: kanji or romaji for Japanese? (was: parallel-port IDE)

[Karl-Max Wagner <karlmax@example.com>]

> If you stay with basic stuff, it works OK. As soon as you start getting
> more deeply into the language, and find out that there are many words
> with the same pronunciation but written with different kanji having different
> nuances, you will realize (well, most sensitive people will realize)
> that to force Japanese into the alphabet is to strike a deep blow at the
> heart of the Japanese culture. Is that what you want to do?

I don't want to do anything. I only set out facts. These facts
haven't been made by me. They simply are like this whether we
like it or not.

> Anyway, you are trying to repeat history, perhaps because you are
> ignorant of the experiment tried by the American occupation forces after
> the war. They took groups of students and gave them all-romaji
> textbooks. After a while, the academic performance of the romaji
> students fell behind that of their kanji-studying counterparts. Then
> they took a random selection of ordinary citizens and tested their
> understanding of kanji. To their surprise, they showed a very high level
> of literacy. The experiment was dropped from that moment.

Hmmm. Very weird. How can academic performance have to do
anything with writing systems ? I suspect rather that there were
other reasons for that. However, before commenting on that much
more data on the details of the experiment are required before
its validity can be asserted.

At least my intellectual capacities weren't affected by learning
Kanji - they were at a certain level before and at pretty much
the same after. However, there should be a difference according
to the above experiment.

That whole Kanji discussion to me appears very similar to the
Morse code discussion in ham radio. All sorts of hair raising
arguments are brought in in favour of keeping it as an exam
criterion. The wonderful result is that ham radio to young
people is seen as something antiquated and thus unattractive.
Consequently the average age of the ham populace becomes higher
and higher. It is only recently that it occurs to more and more
people that not giving up the Morse requirement may well be the
death spell to amateur radio.

> This discussion is not unrelated to computers, or even to Unix. When
> people start telling a culture to shape itself after computers rather
> than sticking to their richest traditions, their priorities are entirely
> screwed up. Rather than telling people to adjust to computers, you must

You don't consider it "screwed up" that these "richest
traditions" had the beautiful effect of simply eliminating the
chance of actively participating in the scientific and technical
evolution of the last 500 years ?

I consider that HORRIBLE ! If a tradition has such a devastating
effect it only deserves one thing: to be nuked into oblivion on
the spot before it can wreak any more damage.

> make computers adjust to people. That goes for the language processing

How about doing the same with writing systems ? In the West kids
can read / write pretty much anything after one or two years of
elementary school training ( and it is even not uncommon that
they know it already when entering school ) which means that
they have full access to all written knowledge from there on and
are free to further their knowledge from there on.

In Japan it takes at least 6 years before this is possible. For
highly gifted kids this is a serious drawback for sure ( I could
read and write at the age of four and used this for feeding my
voracious appetite for information of all kinds. I don't even
dare to think how I'd have fared in Japan.... ).

So much for user friendliness of writing systems.

What I see coming is the following: When Japan continues keeping
traditions that put it so much at a competitive disadvantage
then it soon will get into the technological backwaters. The
result will be huge economic problems against which the present
ones are but a trifle.

If the situation then has become totally unmanageable and
millions of Japanese's only thought is how to pay the next rent
and how to get the next meal then kiss all those richest tradion
goodbye in a hurry. Because then they have to ACT, and ACT they
will. Having no time to find out which of the traditions are
harmful and which are not they will throw them out ALL, and in a
hurry.

The glorious result of this is that litterally everything will
be lost. Is that what YOU want ?

In reality it's not a choice of not giving up anything to giving
up something. It is rather between giving up something,
controlledly, deliberately in order to keep the rest and losing
everything.

Remember the last words of Otto Lilienthal: "Sacrifices need to
be made".

Nevertheless I fear that it will be the above evil scenario that
will happen. The pattern is all too common in human history.
It's first letting slip things with a lot of bad excuses and if
that has caused a totally unmanageable situation getting out of
there with the nuke-everything-in-the-way approach.

================================================================
"It was hell. They knew it.          Karl-Max Wagner
  But they called it                 karlmax@example.com
    W-I-N-D-O-Z-E"
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