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by soraminazuki
1235 days ago
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Japanese children are able to cope with all-hiraganas only because the text they read are so short and simple, accompanied by pictures. No other kind of books are written in all hiraganas, meaning that no person on earth has the required training. Nor do I think it's practical because there are likely to be tons of disambiguation problems with hiragana text. Also, as I said, what worked for Korea centuries ago won't work for modern day Japan. Hangul was developed in an entirely different era where most people was illiterate, and the means for scaling education was non-existent by today's standards. It therefore made sense to reduce the number of letters in the alphabet. However, in modern age Japan, you'll be hard pressed to find a healthy person who can't read or write. There's no reason nor desire to switch to hiraganas only, and every reason otherwise. Changing a language is probably a terrible idea if there's no documented instance of native speakers actually wanting the change. |
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Humans are good at disambiguating in context. Those ambiguities can arise in spoken language too (minus those that are differentiated by pitch accent, but that still leaves enough room for homonyms).
> Changing a language is probably a terrible idea if there's no documented instance of native speakers actually wanting the change.
I agree but that has something to do with sociological reasons. I wasn't advocating for changing Japanese.
As late as the Edo period, there were entire genres of literature that were written almost entirely in Kana: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanaz%C5%8Dshi
Clearly, people were able to read that.