And they shall make a computer of Dimethylphosphite molecules: 2 or 3 qubits shall be the capacity thereof, and a cubit and a half the length thereof, and a half cubit the breadth thereof…
Japanese also don't distinct v/b and l/r so love [lav] is written as rabu (-u because with exception of -n they don't like to end word on consonant), thus "rabu songu"
Oh, I found the apparently quite limited number of Japanese syllables interesting, and indeed:
> The basic units of the Japanese writing system are syllables. Standard Japanese uses 100 distinct syllables. Of these, 5 are single vowels, 62 are consonants combined with a vowel, and 53 are consonants combined with 'y' plus a vowel. [1]
Which suggests a relatively obvious possibility of a simple writing system, where learning to write and read doesn't require memorizing countless (logographic / concept based) kanji. Though kanji seem to be older. So apparently the syllable/character association was not as obvious as it seems.
It's interesting that assigning syllables characters isn't really practical in Germanic/Romance languages, as there are far more than in Japanese. One source cites 15.000 out of 100.000 possible for English [2]. It's actually cool that someone came up with the consonant/vowel distinction, ages ago, which saves tons of characters, and which proved to be a big advantage (mostly over logographic writing) when the printing press took Europe by storm, while it flopped in China and Korea [3].
> Which suggests a relatively obvious possibility of a simple writing system, where learning to write and read doesn't require memorizing countless (logographic / concept based) kanji. Though kanji seem to be older. So apparently the syllable/character association was not as obvious as it seems.
Its somewhat shocking to me that you are not aware of hiragana and katakana or at the very least romanji. They are mentioned in [1] in the writing section.
From [1]:
> Kanji : Thousands of characters borrowed from Chinese writing, each with a different meaning
> Hiragana : 46 "smooth" style phonetic symbols used for inflected endings, grammatical particles and other Japanese words
> Katakana : 46 "block" style phonetic symbols used for writing foreign loan words, foreign names, and for emphasis
It's not either or, they are used together. Once you become even an intermediate learner of the language lack of kanji actually makes it more difficult to read text that is just in kana. Japanese and Chinese can also present the interesting problem for a learner of perfectly understanding what a written sentence means without having the ability to actually say it out loud.
Also excluding names, there are less than two thousand kanji in modern Japanese. Still a lot but not some insurmountable task.