RE: tlug: Re: Japanese input

["Jonathan Byrne - 3Web" <jq@example.com>]

Jonathan Byrne <E-mail:jq@example.com>
Media and Content Section
3Web - Your Internet Solution! <URL:http://www.threeweb.ad.jp/index.en.html>

-----Original Message-----
差出人 : Cliff Miller <cliff@example.com>

>Such proposals are actually not new. Mainland China tried with
>little success to promote pinyin (the phonetic transliteration system
>for hanzi (kanji)) during the earlier years of Mao. It seems that they
>have pretty much given up. [Korean may be a good example of how things
>could change according to what I believe you want to propose, but I
>think that the Japanese will not go down that path.]

I agree that Japan will not go that way now, and not in the foreseeable (or
imaginable) future.  When the Korean alphabet was adopted, it had the
advantages of being delivered onto a mostly illiterate populace, and of
being devised (at least according to the story) and promulgated by the king.

>For all the complexity, there are real advantages in kanji. Japan has
>the lowest illiteracy rate in the world. Of course, the educational

As long as we consider reading lurid comic books on the train to be literacy
;-)

>system has a lot to do with it, but not everything. Dyslexia
>is unheard of (correct me if I'm wrong here) in Japan and

You're wrong.  A close Japanese friend of mine is dyslexic (not severely,
but enough to be affected by it).  Since dyslexia is a hardware problem, I
don't think it should be influenced by what a person's native spoken or
written language is.  If dyslexia is rarer in Japan, I would suspect that
it's probably less common in the gene pool than it is in other places.

You're right that between practical factors and cultural factors, kanji is
not going to go away.  So let's flog those input methods :-)

Jonathan


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