Hacker News Reader

Spoken Japanese uses pitch accent to distinguish homophones

In some cases, but note that (a) this is only true for a tiny handful of homophones, and (b) the distinguishing accent varies by region.

E.g. "hashi" famously can mean bridge/edge/chopsticks depending on accent, but which accent has which meaning is different in Tokyo vs Osaka.

So shouldn't the better solution be a few more pronounciation markers beyond two strokes, a circle and tiny letters instead of thousands of chinese characters?

But who is this solution for? Unless you change the pronunciation of the language, it would be adding markers around whole syllables to disambiguate - syllables that represent the kanji they came from (many of which already have phoentic components) - but those syllables would still be less dense and visually identifiable than kanji is for someone who already speaks the language.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com