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by svara
872 days ago
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Regarding your point (2), it's not that simple, since written / literary language uses a larger vocabulary, making homonyms more of a problem. In fact if you search a Japanese dictionary in hiragana with a combination of two reasonably common kanji readings (say かん+ちょう), you'll often get a double digit number of results (12 in jmdict in this example). Most of these are uncommon words unlikely to be used in the spoken language, but could occur in writing. It could probably still work more or less by relying on context, but it's more of an issue than you make it sound. Another point is that writing in hiragana with spaces would disconnect the language from its roots. The Kanji used add a layer of meaning to the language that isn't there in languages with phonetic alphabets, and help guessing at the meanings of unknown words. You could probably argue that making it easier to learn to read and write would outweigh the loss of those benefits, but I'm not so sure. Japan has a high literacy rate, so it does seem to work alright. |
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Assuming that homophones are simply going to exist in the languages, there's probably other alternatives. For example, in the case of modern Korean readers, the Hanja can supposedly used to help clarify the meaning of a homophone where context doesn't provide clarity. But in practice, most Korean readers don't use Hanja enough to remember more than a small percentage of what they learn in school, so they work in effect as an index into a lookup table, where they look the Hanja up in a dictionary, find the definition written in Hangul, and use that to determine the meaning.
Support Japanese was reformed to entirely use one or both Kana in the way that modern Koreans use mostly Hangul. Then Kanji would be used to help determine meaning in the same way. As most people wouldn't encounter Kanji with enough frequency and distribution to remember the bulk of them, only the most common would be remembered. These are unlikely to be the difficult to discern homophones as contextual clues would clarify. So the Kanji would again also end up as indexes for looking up standardized definitions. In modern Japanese, this doesn't happen because Kanji is still used with enough frequency and variety that most people sustain some level of memory about the system. The question is how well do they remember it? [1][2][3][4][5]
1 - https://youtu.be/sJNxPRBvRQg 2 - https://youtu.be/IARguDQIGVs 3 - https://youtu.be/cpAnrVYMJho 4 - https://youtu.be/PhtOewdIxII 5 - https://youtu.be/-E6vHCT0wpw
So for non-Sino CJK languages, instead of spending so much time in education learning what amounts to a very complex lookup table indexing scheme, why not just standardize the definitions and use the numbers of the definitions as post-fixes to ambiguous homophones with Chinese origins?