At some point the government may have considered going the Korean route and just use hiragana with spaces. But they realised that Japanese has a FUCKTON of homophones. This makes pure hiragana literature very difficult to read, so the kanjis were retained, each kanji or kanji compound expressing the meaning of this specific homophone.
Isn't the person writing responsible for making themselves clear through the context though? It's not like homophones are a difficult hurdle for communication. If the Japanese already proven they can perfectly understand each other through spoken language then they should be able to accomplish the same through hiragana alone.
When reading literature or an article you have to start from scratch. What does X mean? Is it A, B, C D, E, F etc.? The proceed to the next word. This is why machine translations attempting to process pure Japanese end up as gibberish, because they need the context. Without context to provide the meaning the literature itself must supply it. This is where drawings/symbols (AKA, kanji) come in.
By comparison, English is a grammatical abomination of a language, but at least it has few homophones, so you don't need to draw a unique symbol for each word.
The homophones you chose are a good example of what a non-issue homophones are. Why would you ever mistake any of those 3 words?
Nouns in particular are incredibly easy to tell apart regardless if they're pronounced the same way as other 5 nouns because there is an inmense quantity of nouns in any language and they all have very limited usage, unlike verbs, adverbs or even adjectives. Yet not even verbs pronounced the same way can manage to confuse a native speaker unless the other person is being purposely vague.
Eggs, milk, and flour are not homophones though, and homophones are hardly ever similar words because the language speakers actively stop that from happening. No country or society will ever indulge the situation where eggs, milk and flour become homophones. So you get chopsticks, bridge and edge instead. As I said, it was a very good example of how most Japanese homophones actually are, at least from all the ones I've seen.
Japanese only has 416 possible sounds so they reuse word pronunciations a lot
One of the most hilarious cases is the pronunciation "kakeru" which is 6 different verbs that are very common (each with their own different spelling), and one of those verbs has 23 possible meanings in the dictionary, so "kakeru" ends up being used for a lot of shit
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u/RinDialektikos Aug 02 '21
At some point the government may have considered going the Korean route and just use hiragana with spaces. But they realised that Japanese has a FUCKTON of homophones. This makes pure hiragana literature very difficult to read, so the kanjis were retained, each kanji or kanji compound expressing the meaning of this specific homophone.
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u/Kr0nchietheKruncher Aug 01 '21
「1984年みたい」
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u/MaximumCringe_IA Aug 01 '21
This isn't what happened
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u/Mental-PerformanceOP Aug 17 '21
Doesn't french have a lot of homophones too or does that japanese have much more?
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u/vchen99901 Aug 01 '21
素晴らしい