What surprises me (only a little) is that Japan continues to use Chinese characters when they've got a perfectly good native syllabary.
At least, that's the reason why I prefer still having kanji around.
So at a minimum, dropping kanji would mean the language needed to develop a system for where spaces go (which is less trivial than it sounds IMO). But also it would need to abandon a lot of homophones or find some way to disambiguate them. It could happen I guess, but I'm not sure how it could happen gradually.
It's a bit easier for Korean as it has far more available syllables (so fewer homonyms), but you could easily imagine these languages making different tradeoffs and ending up in different places.
What did happen was that we lost obscure words that could only be understood by looking at Chinese characters (because they're used so rarely, or because they sound the same as another more common word) - you could still use them if you wanted to, but unless you also write them in Hanja, it would be confusing, and if you mix gratuitous Hanja into your writing just because you like those words, most young readers will find it pretentious, and I fear, mostly unreadable.
I can't say we lost much by losing these words. Rather, I think it actually forced writers to select less ambiguous words, which is usually a good thing.
(Also, these days most Koreans know much more English than Classical Chinese, so English loanwords can sometimes fill the gap. It helps that most English (or other Western) loanwords sound different from native or Sino-Korean words, so there's less chance of collision.)
When you're reading, you're trying to identify a substring and map it back to the unit of meaning, which is effectively the kanji. That works seamlessly with Hangul, because it mostly blocks (as syllables) the same way as kanji, and, as you mentioned, the extra vowels and silent consonants provide more disambiguation. With kana, the length you have to scan to read, and then guess at (using only context to disambiguate), a root word, is a lot more arbitrary.
Mechanically kana is just less compressed, less aligned, and makes it harder to visually identify/scan for units of meaning. Obviously Korean shows that you can make different tradeoffs, but for Japanese losing the kanji would probably necessitate reworking Kana as well - and unless the pronunciation changed, it would probably need to be in a way that represents the pitch accent, which is a modifier on the whole syllable, rather than just a few extra consonants or vowels.
This is a not a new method of writing, but this is how writing was done in the past, for many millennia.
The oldest writing systems, like the cuneiform and the Egyptian, also used, besides signs that indicated the pronunciation of a word, determinative signs, which indicated the semantic domain of the word, e.g. it is a name of a human profession, it is a name of an animal, it is a name of a tool made of metal, it is a geographic name, and so on.
The determinative signs could be Chinese radicals to continue the tradition, or they could be a special set of emojis.
Sort of. The adoption of a Latin script would risk severing cultural continuity – a likely deal breaker in a society such as Japan, where history, tradition, and inherited form are not decorative artefacts but active components of cultural identity.
Consider the following two Japanese surnames that – today – are spelled as Kanō and Gotō (I happen to have a close Japanese friend with this surname).
They can be rendered as:
Kanō: 狩野 and 加納
Gotō: 後藤 and 五島
The medieval 狩野氏[0] of Izu was an established warrior lineage. Its members occur in the Azuma Kagami, and the family was active by 1180. It belonged to a Fujiwara-derived lineage.
加納[1] is explicitly recorded with historical kana カナフ. A separate 加納氏 belonged to the Miura–Sawara grouping that divided control of Aizu after Yoritomo's Ōshū campaign. The official history of Kitakata lists 加納氏 separately amongst these medieval families.
後藤[2] The 後藤 lineage is attested in the twelfth century. 後藤基清, born in 1155, was the adopted son of 後藤実基 and served as a Kamakura-period warrior.
五島[3] This is the most interesting example as 五島 came from the unrelated medieval 宇久氏. The 宇久 had already been established by the Kamakura period and later controlled the Gotō islands. After Ukuji was promoted to Bunroku's service, he changed his surname from Uku to Gotō, and developed into the Gotō clan, a daimyo of the early-modern times.
None of that historical lineage can be faithfully preserved through the use of a Latin script. The characters themselves carry continuity – visual (radicals), literary and civilisational – that transliteration can approximate only by discarding precisely what made the tradition contiguous in the first place and compressing them into a neutered phonetic contraption.
Then there is the separate issue that Chinese characters, their readings and the vocabulary associated with them entered Japanese through several successive waves of cultural import, with one particularly important layer having been introduced during the Tang dynasty, when Japan extensively adopted Chinese literary, administrative and cultural models. Different readings, compounds and usages consequently preserve historical or cultural nuances associated with particular periods of Japanese contact with China.
[0] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E7%8B%A9%E9%87%8E%E6%B0%8F-1155209
[1] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%8A%A0%E7%B4%8D-45984
[2] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%BE%8C%E8%97%A4%E5%9F%BA%E6%B8%8...
[3] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%AE%87%E4%B9%85%E6%B0%8F-1148019
I never get this line of reasoning - so are people listening to spoken japanese just in a perpetual state of confusion because they can't see the associated intended Kanji?
Also this coming from a person on a platform who's primary language is commonly pronounced with the last syllable/letter of each word used to start the next one.
The engli shlanguage ha sit sown nonsense.
It's similar to initialisms or emoji in English; it's of course frustrating for people who don't know them, and there are reasonable complaints about some of the extremes, but speakers/writers use them because they find them useful when communicating with an audience that's also assumed to know them.
E.g. "hashi" famously can mean bridge/edge/chopsticks depending on accent, but which accent has which meaning is different in Tokyo vs Osaka.
Kind of humorously, groups sometimes develop lingo to avoid all this. E.g. the JP words for science and chemistry both have the standard pronunciation "kagaku", so people in industries where both terms are used often use nonstandard pronunciations (bakegaku for chemistry).
Also the homophones thing is probably lesser of the things I mentioned. A typical sentence might only have 1 or 2 overloaded words, but it will have lots of substrings that can be parsed multiple ways.
Secondly, there are many homonyms: words written with completely different kanji that sound exactly the same, very similar (e.g. same modulo pitch accent) or use the same spelling in kana.
Here are two words that don't sound the same at all. Let's use Hepburn, because it distinguishes them: kõri and kouri. One has a long o, the other has separate o and u. In hiragana, both are written こうり: exactly the same. kōri might be 公理 (axiom, self-evident truth) or 高利 (high interest rate). kouri is 小売 (retail, lit. "little selling").
If you're having a conversation with someone and don't know which "kõri" they are talking about, high interest rate or axiom, you can ask. But you cannot just ask a written text. You have to work it out from context.
Kanji eliminate the ambiguity, vastly simplifying reading. Reading Japanese that has been normalized to kana is murder. Especially if spaces are not introduced to mark word divisions. That is only done in hiragana books for small children!
Sometimes this happens in writing. A sentence happens to start with a couple of words that happen to be usually written in hiragana, with some particles after them, and you're left with a puzzle just working out where the word boundaries are. This requires backtracking in the general case; there is no principle like longest match.
Native speakers get confused in conversations and have to refer to kanji regarding which word they mean. Except they don't write down the kanji; they think of a very common word which has that kanji and say things like, "the shō syllable in my word is the same (kanji) as in shōrai".
The vast majority of the Japanese vocabulary consists of word roots made from the combination of two kanji. The language-making itself is not separable from kanji.
Japanese is only spoken language like others basically only for small children and idiots. Literate, grown-up Japanese is a written language first.
I seriously doubt that. Literacy levels rose in Japan during the Meiji era and that produced pressure towards simplification of the writing system. Sure, Japan didn't go all the way to a pure kana system or to a latin-derived script, but the reasons are political and cultural (and there is nothing wrong with that) rather than linguistic.
In any cases, you didn't disprove my point, which is that the need for kanji is self-fulfilling. It feels necessary, precisely because its usage prevents the evolution of the phonetic kana system into something useful.
Well, yes? The language is built on kanji. In a 100,000 word dictionary, the vast amount of content is words that someone made up by putting together kanji. It is kanji-first. None of it makes sense when you strip away the kanji, and formation of new words is blocked. Kanji is a cultural cornerstone.
Before literacy, commoners had 5000 word vocabularies cradle to grave. Anything beyond that was the domain of the erudite elite.
> the phonetic kana system
The kana system is quasi-phonetic. It doesn't capture phonetics accurately, like IPA, and has ambiguities of its own.
But, again, phonetics doesn't help when twelve words have identical phonetics!
Sure, you can fix all this if you just change Japanese into another language.
So, it is absolutely baked in and kanji first. without kanji the following tongue twister is indecipherable.
Niwaniwaniwatori ga, uraniwanimoniwaniwatoriga iru.
庭には二羽鶏が、裏庭にも二羽鶏がいる。
中庭の中には、鶏の二羽がワニにお世話になりました。〜と、誰かに岩の上で言われた。
As for the other premise that modifying the phonetics to accomplish a simplification is based on a narrow view of the reason for retaining kanji literacy... there are important and substantive records for business, legal, and actively functional culture which exist in kanji and require kanji literacy to maintain agreement in society that is one of the differences between Japan and most other places. Who else still operates on contractual obligations from written records of the 17th century? Many current farming leases for large parts of the country are backed with the actual stamped, brush stroke written land records from then, stored at the prefecture on the original papers. Losing the ability to read and write kanji would be detrimental to ongoing cultural stability, and so it will not and should not be entertained by anyone living in that system. People living in a 'for now' mindset are irrelevant to actuality.
You keep missing the point, so I'll try one last time. Look at a picture of the Rosetta stone. I can read Greek but I find the Greek part hard to read. It's written entirely in capital letters with no spacing and no punctuation. (Maybe there were people like you at the time claiming that hieroglyphs were easier to read than Greek.) Modern Greek still uses the Greek alphabet but it has evolved into something much more readable. The same thing happened to latin.
I claim that the Japanese kana system is stuck in its own figurative Rosetta era. There are no reasons why it could not evolve into something readable and not purely phonetic. With all due respect, I don't consider seriously your argument that Japanese is an exceptional language uniquely based on combination of foreign characters that can only be considered a spoken language by children and idiots. There are arguments for kanji that I find convincing, yours has to be the worst.
As for homophones, why would that be a problem? They are not unique to Japanese! For instance, in French, the only reason why 'a' and 'à' are spelt differently is to make it easier to tell them apart in writing. They are pronounced exactly the same. French has a lot more examples like that, and actually, using wrong spellings for words notoriously makes French much harder to read, even if the spelling is phonetically correct. French writing is not purely phonetic, it's only one way: if you know how to write a word, you usually know how to pronounce it but the converse is not true. Yet, it is still a much simpler system than the Japanese one. Children can fully read at age 6, although writing with few spelling mistakes takes more time.
I think at some early point most Japanese learners (that don't already know a Chinese language) think kanji should be dropped. And at a later point I think most would change their mind as the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
Even though hiragana can be traced back to the 5th century, the educated and elites continued to use kanji exclusively until the 20th century, whereas hiragana was relegated to unofficial writing and it first became popular amongst women, hence gaining the condescending status of «female writing». Drawing parallels with hangul (as some have noticed) is not entirely correct as hangul entered the official use in the 15th century and has been in the extensive use for writing since then, even though the use of hanja has ceased only relatively recently. Hiragana entered the stage approximately four centuries later.
Katakana, on the other hand, was developed by Buddhist monks in the 9th century to translate texts from India and later to represent borrowed words. The Empire of Japan used kanji and katakana in official documents.
Then there is a distinction between the syllabary and vocabulary.
Chinese vocabulary and pronunciation has entered Japanese in three distinct waves: go-on, kan-on and tō-on. The Tang dynasty kan-on wave was particularly and enormously important as it has supplied Japanese with a major new pronunciation system, vocabulary, administrative culture and literary.
The earlier go-on wave is associated with Buddhist terminology that prefers the go-on readings, and the tō-on wave readings occur particularly in vocabulary brought through medieval and early-modern contact with China.
Therefore, the same character can therefore contain several historical layers, for example: 明 has go-on myō, kan-on mei and tō-on min as in:
明王 /myōō/ historical layer: go-on, meaning: a Buddhist «Wisdom King» (such as 不動明王 Fudō Myōō)
明王 /meiō/ historical layer: kan-on, meaning «a wise, enlightened or excellent ruler».
明朝 is even more interesting as the reading of /myōchō/, being an older myō reading, indicates «tomorrow morning» whereas the /minchō/ reading, being a tō-on, indicates «the Ming dynasty» or related to the Ming dynasty.
Neither hiragana nor katakana can preserve such details, and, depending on whom one asks, it may or may not acceptable to a Japanese national. Perhaps the younger generation cares less but it is not all that clear cut.