Re: does a blind person need to learn kanji while learning Japanese?
Hello,
@6: yes, of course, the quality of language construction depends on how we define a good language. Ludwik Zamenhof was asking this question almost 150 years back, when he was constructing Esperanto. And even though lingvistics of those times can't be compared to the currentone, Esperanto is still from grammatical point of view a language with one of the best constructions out there.
The core stone of its construction is regularity. It has a stable alphabet, with regular reading, regular suffixes, regular prefixes, regular grammar and rather simple rules.
Thanks to this regularity, one can become fluent in Esperanto in just few months of study, unlike probably any of the mainstream languages.
Now, another viewpoint is, that a language doesn't need to be just regular, but also melodic and flexible. I can't tell, how well does Esperanto fit these two criterias, as I don't speak it and neither hear it often enough. I know, that some artificially made languages tend to fail these, for example Interslavic. It's an artificial language, which can be understood by all slavs without any prior learning. It really works, but to be honest, at least in my opinion, it sounds terribly. Although that may be caused by the fact, that some slavic languages sound quite bad to me, but that's another topic.
Anyway, there are mainstream languages which sound good, have a good construction and are widely used. For example Italian. It has stable 26-letters alphabet, with completely regular pronounciation and regular grammar.
In fact, their writing system is even better than the slovakone, even though they're missing some sounds unique to slavic languages, so we couldn't use it.
Thus, as mentioned above, regularity is a characteristics which I expect from a good language construction.
Now, how does a language using 3 alphabets, 3 to 8 thousand characters, with various possible pronounciations, and a really big bunch of homophones fit the word regular?
Well, it doesn't. Perhaps the only regular thing on Japanese is its grammar, although I can't judge this properly, as like stated before, I don't speak the language yet.
As for ta in chinese, for representing he, she and it, there are really separate characters for each.
他 for he
她 for she
它 for it
Each has a different unicode code, and a different shape notation (for example cangjie, OPD for he, VPD for she and JP for it).
Although in this concrete case, she and it are less frequent than he (they have frequency 2 out of 5 according to the Unihan database, while he has frequency 1), there are many cases where two different characters from frequency 1 share the same pronounciation (even used tone).
I made a little research some time ago in order to explore possible ways of increasing reading accuracy of chinese texts for blind people, and only taking in Unihan characters with classified frequency of 1, one mandarin pronounciation had in average about 4 different characters.
And again, these were just really the most frequently used characters, about 1700? I can't recall now, don'ŧ take this super exactly, it seems I've lost the source code somehow.
But anyway, I'm sure it was significantly under the 3000 border I've mentioned in my previous post, and the number of homophones is drastically increasing as more characters are given for analysis.
From lingwistic point of view, this is simply crazy. Just imagine doing a speech synthesiser for Chinese, you can start out by writing up a whole dictionary.
And Japanese has simply inherited this mess, adding two more alphabets and various pronounciations, just for fun.
Now, seriously, about the Japanese homophones. I don't have statistics about Japanese pronounciations. This is one of the two main real arguments in "why Japan needs kanji" discussions I've read, with the other being that kanjis require less space than full hiragana words.
I don't know how serious it is in spoken form, but in the writtenone, it's simply an excuse, like in case of Chinese.
Some sources:
https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/must-use-kanji/
https://japantoday.com/category/feature … characters
And the list could go on, I'm not pasting more, as they can be easily found by simple searching for kanji yes / no discussions.
As for hiragana irregularities, yes, there is plenty of them.
For example, su. Sometimes you say it in full form, like sumimasen. But sometimes you omit the u completely, like in gozaimasu, and masu in general.
Shi is normally spoken with i, like in shitsureeshimasu. And sometimes its' simply dropped, like in hajimemashite.
Someone has also got the great idea, that ha when used as a particle will be read as wa, even though there already is one wa in use. Good luck with distinguishing programmatically, what is a particle and what is not.
R in japanese seems to be read individually for each word, either as r, d or l. For example, you say sayounara, and not sayounada nor sayounala. But you read ryugakusei as dyugakusei, or gyugakusei, but not ryu nor lyu. I can't recall now a typical japanese word using l, but for example Lucy is in Japanese written as Ruushii.
And finally, half of Japan for some reason likes to put n before sillables starting with g, like nga, nge, ngo, and Hiragana lessons don't consider important mentioning it. I thought for few months after starting to learn Japanese, that I'm most likely deaf, when I heard daingakuno instead of daigakuno, what is the correct hiragana transcription and didn't find anywhere an explanation of why is it so. Finally, after some time, I've found an article stating, that it's a local difference, depending on whether one is in western or eastern Japan, if I remember right.
It's worth noting here, that although hiragana is far from a perfect writing system, its far better than English in pronounciation. This is a big problem of English in general, as everyone pronounces everything in various ways, leading to various accents, what makes the language significantly harder to understand.
Slovak for example has almost perfect writing system. If we write s, it's s, and nothing else. If we write su, it's su and nothing else. If we write ši (shi in english), it's shi and it will stay like that always, no matter where and how you use it. Write as you hear, that's the core principle of Slovak language writing system, and it works very well.
The reason why I said almost perfect is, that certain idiots in history had the urgent need to introduce letter Y in 1850s. Y is in Slovak absolutely useless letter, even according to linguists, it doesn't have any special pronounciation role, only tons of rules when to write it and when not, as it's pronounced in the same way as normal I.
Well, human stupidity doesn't know any borders. Now we can't get rid of it, as everything from IDs to laws uses it, and it wouldn't be cheap to rewrite everything back.
Best regards
Rastislav
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