Re: tlug: Re: Japanese input

["Jonathan Byrne" <jpmag@example.com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Karl-Max Wagner <karlmax@example.com>


>About 500 years later, around 1000 AD ( middle Heian ), a
clever
>guy developed an alphabetic system, known hitherto as kana
to

Actually, kana is not an alphabet, it's a syllabary.  Korean
has an alphabet.

>replace the complicated Chinese system. This was
subsequently

It wasn't invented to replace kanji, either.  Kana came into
being as a shorthand used by students for taking lecture
notes.  Nor will kana ever replace kanji as the sole writing
system.  Why not?  Try reading a few pages written
exclusively in kana and you'll start to get the picture.

As difficult as it may be, doing away with kanji would be
neither politically nor culturally easy, as you suggest, but
also would present a lot of practical issues to be resolved,
chiefly that Japanese has a huge number of homophones, and
kanji are a way to handle differentiation between these.
They don't do a bad job,either.  To switch to an alphabet
would probably require the etablishment of a set of
diacritic marks for Japanese.  Of course, this could be
done.  I read somewhere recently that there is even an
entire magazine published in romaji, by a group that favors
abolishing kanji.

However, as you mentioned, the cultural pressure against
doing away with kanji would be so great that other issues
would essentially not even matter, I think.

Even in China, they have only gone so far as to simplify the
kanji.  And you'll note that the Chinese simplified kanji
have not been adopted anywhere else.  Only the PRC uses
them, so we may be able to draw the conclusion from this
that if you can't change the kanji at the point of a gun,
you can't change them.  I doubt there would be a great deal
of support for a similar simplified kanji system here,
either.  And you know what?  Those simplified kanji are kind
of ugly anyway, I think.


The political difficulty of getting a unified Linux input
method (and this is what makes it more or less impossible,
rather than technical problems) pales beside the idea of
trying to substantially simplify, or worse, do away with,
the kanji.  Everyone says kanji is tough, but I think not
many people would actually want to change it.  Look at us
Linux users:  sure the learning curve is killingly cruel
coming over from another OS, but do we or do we not take
pride in that? :-)

Cheers,

Jonathan

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