It would be interesting if the common availability of spellcheck turned out to obviate such reform. Technology would be retarding progress and enabling ossification in this instance.
For Japanese, the current state is that most new words are loan words written with the non-kanji syllabaries. It makes you wonder if someday the loan words will overbalance the originals, causing kanji to die out from Japanese (as it has, to some extent, from Korean).
This is not a technological issue, it's a social one. After the American conquest of Japan the American occupation forces were quite keen on the idea of language reform, whether using romaji or one of the native syllabaries. The idea died a death when they compared ease of decoding/reading speed. Japanese speakers, even not terribly well educated ones in terms of years of education were on a level with English speakers. Mao wanted to replace the hanzi with pinyin (the modern romanisation used in the PRC) but didn't feel it was worth the political cost. Replacing the hanzi/kanji would be a boon for foreigners but a massive and unnecessary disruption for Japanese and Chinese speakers.
>For Japanese, the current state is that most new words are loan words written with the non-kanji syllabaries. It makes you wonder if someday the loan words will overbalance the originals, causing kanji to die out from Japanese (as it has, to some extent, from Korean).
Korean is a very different case from Japanese or Chinese. If the Japanese hadn't conquered Korea they'd probably be using some combination of hanja (hanzi/kanji) and hangul (the syllabary used in modern Korea (North and South). To be fair that's the case nowadays but there are less than 300 hanja that every educated Korean would know. Any literate Japanese person knows over two thousand. The kanji aren't going anywhere in Japanese. They're the words that you use for educated, literate speech.
I meant that fonts and IMEs make it technically unfeasible to change kanji or create new ones.
> kanji .. are the words that you use for educated, literate speech.
But not for neologisms. That's what my post was about.
Further, my lay understanding of Japanese history is that their have been many attempts to reduce or eliminate kanji usage.
Actually IMEs have led to a resurgence in kanji usage. A lot of words that normal people could not (and were not expected to) write in kanji are now used online every day, to the extent that grade schools now teach them as kanji to appear on reading tests but not to be graded in handwritten essays. The most famous example of these "read only" kanji is 鬱 ('utsu', depression or melancholy), introduced to the school system in 2013 (iirc).
Also words that can be written in either kanji or kana but with a preference for kana in modern edited text are often written in kanji online (like 或いは instead of あるいは).