| > It's because each syllable has to have its own ideograph False. If you look at the history of writing systems, we have seen at least three instances of logographic systems developing into syllabries. Egyptian hieroglyphs eventually devolved into representing only consonants (vowels in Semitic languages largely represent only inflectional variations, so they're far less necessary). When this language and its descendants passed into Greek, distinct letters were added for vowels yielding an alphabet; when it passed into Indic languages, the consonants were systematically modified (e.g., rotating the glyphs) to make CV letter-form pairs. Mayan broke its logography into CV syllables (much akin to how Japanese derived the kana from kanji). Mayan and the Indic scripts are great examples of the flexible of syllabic systems. Mayan is not a CV-syllable language, yet they still used CV glyphs. The syllable "bak" could be written, for example, as the glyphs for "ba" and "ka". Indic scripts, representing languages that have phontactics as complex as English, yet they also retain basic CV letters. Even Japanese plays similar games: each letter doesn't represent a syllable, it represents a mora. The syllable "nan" would be represented as having 2 mora: "na" "n". Similar, the phrase "ですか" is written "de su ka" but is pronounced "de ska" in most dialects. The Japanese kana orthography isn't really limiting its ability to add more sounds any more than the Latin alphabet limits our ability to represent sounds foreign to Latin speakers 2000 years ago like n of 'sing' (IPA: ŋ) or the th of 'the' (IPA: ð). What makes English hard to pronounce for Japanese is that our phonotactics are very incompatible. You can see the same effects for English speakers trying to pronounce, say, Czech: "strč prst skrz krk" is pronounced exactly like it looks (well, you have to know that č is the 'ch' of chocolate in Czech), yet it is still difficult for an English person to pronounce. It's not that we can't make those sounds, it's that we can't put them in that order (/ŋgis/ makes for another good example". The other difficulty Japanese speakers have is that some phonemes aren't recognized as separate--the infamous l/r comes up here. In general, Japanese don't hear a difference between them. Native English speakers can have the same reaction to other cases: both ś and sz in Polish sound like 'sh' to an English speaker, but they represent two distinct phonemes. |