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

[Kei Furuuchi <kfur@example.com>]

Neil Booth writes:
 > Scott Stone wrote:
 > > 
 > > On Mon, 19 Oct 1998, John De Hoog wrote:
 > > 
 > > > No, it was not studying kanji that made the difference. The difference
 > > > was that the students who studied in kanji had a deeper understanding of
 > > > what they were studying than those who studied the same material in
 > > > romaji. This is the whole point of the necessity of kanji. Japanese is
 > > > limited phonetically. It borrowed lots of words from Chinese, which is
 > > > richer phonetically. To distinguish words that end up sounding the same
 > > > in Japanese, it needs the kanji. Even over the phone, people have to
 > > > resort to explaining which kanji they mean sometimes.
 > > 
 > > This would indicate to me that something IS wrong with the Japanese
 > > language, if you have to explain yourself verbally via the writing system.
 > 
 > It's nothing to do with a writing system, that just happens to be a
 > convenient mutually-comprehensible way of distinguishing homophones
 > ("Shinjuku no juku", "sett as in badger"). Are you saying you've never
 > come across a situation using English, where your "aite" wondered which
 > English word you were referring to?
 > 
 > I'm English, and I have hundreds of times. In both languages, it's what
 > many jokes are founded upon. Let's be at least a bit realistic here...
 > 

I think there is something wrong with Japanese language by borrowing
kanji but not borrowing pronunciation of it to differenciate.

"Why is 6 afraid of 7 because 7 ate 9" is a joke because two meanings
in the respective context. But, there are a lot more examples where
context doesn't change in Japanese. Because of it, now Japanese
borrows from English a lot and don't translate them into Kanji.

Similar example:

Why English use articles while Russian doesn't?
Why Egnlish doesn't omit pronouns while Italian does?
That is because articles are needed to distingush the word between
verb and noun and pronouns are needed to distinguish verbs between
imperative and others. 

I think Japanese as spoken language is like English without using
articles or pronouns. It may work, but accidents happen.

Regards,
Kei.
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