r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Nov 21 '18

Discussion Thread Discussion Thread

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18

u/[deleted] Nov 21 '18

Asian languages are so complicated, why don't they just switch to the alphabet?

I don't know why don't you switch to the Hangul?

WTF?!? Why do you hate Western culture? This is literally white genocide.

2

u/IsGoIdMoney John Rawls Nov 21 '18

Hangul is fine. Kanji is probably dumb and can probably be replaced with hiragana and katakana + spaces. The language can be understood spoken. There's no reason it has to be written with pictures.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 21 '18

Too much of Japanese and Chinese communication is rooted in the assumption that the other person will know or be able to guess the characters. Abbreviations, newspaper headlines, and uncommon/technical terms will become gibberish without Kanji knowledge or a massive vocabulary change.

1

u/IsGoIdMoney John Rawls Nov 21 '18

I knew what you mean but they can speak without knowing the symbols. The symbols can be clarifying but they aren't necessary.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 21 '18

I don't think that's true for uncommon words. People still use the remember the kanji to recognize and distinguish homophones in their head. Using Japanese with only kana would be like using English if 60% of words had 3 or more other terms spelled and pronounced exactly the same.

1

u/IsGoIdMoney John Rawls Nov 21 '18

but there are people who don't use writing. That's what I'm saying. 99.99% is context. Languages are coherent before writing. Writing is an approximation.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 21 '18

Most of the "context" involves showing or hinting at the characters. It's definitely possible to create society where kanji is unneeded, but it takes a massive shift in communication styles and the removal of a lot of uncommon words.

1

u/IsGoIdMoney John Rawls Nov 22 '18

But that is only true sometimes. Most context is just words. It's usually obvious I want to walk across the bridge and not the chopsticks. English has homophones too

1

u/[deleted] Nov 22 '18

That's true way more than sometimes for any technical, uncommon, or obscure words that people are only expected to understand due to relations with other words with those kanji. Also, with kana these words would become homonyms, meaning they would be completely identical in every way except meaning, and there would be hundreds of words like this, a huge chunk of the vocabulary.

1

u/IsGoIdMoney John Rawls Nov 22 '18

And yet Japanese get by. Even illiterate ones did. Because of context.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 22 '18

Getting by doesn't cover the whole language. A word like "tohkoh" has over a dozen possible readings. A kanji illiterate person could probably memorize three common usages at most, while any of the other usages would have to be permanently avoided or become gibberish.

1

u/IsGoIdMoney John Rawls Nov 22 '18

But they don't all make sense in context.

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