| >I mean, do we really need both hiragana and katakana? It is pretty redundant, but it's helpful sometimes: foreign loanwords (esp. from English these days) are almost exclusively written in katakana, so they stand out. Also, having some stuff in katakana and some in hiragana helps to distinguish the different words, since Japanese doesn't use spaces. >For example, the words "tea" and "car" have the same pronunciation (차=cha) and so they are indistinguishable in writing, but it wasn't the case when Chinese characters were used (茶/車) 1. I'm surprised "car" isn't called "sha" instead (as it is in the onyomi reading of 車 in Japanese, which was borrowed from Chinese). 2. This would be a good place to borrow from Japanese: the kinyomi (stand-alone word) pronunciation is "kuruma", which probably won't be confused with anything in Korean. :-) As for Korean ditching Chinese characters, it seems like Japanese is doing that too, just very very slowly. There are many words that have kanji versions that no one uses any more, preferring hiragana instead. And there's a lot of stuff being borrowed from English. For instance, 切符 (kippu) is the normal Japanese word for "ticket", but these days, everyone's calling it "チケット" (chiketto) which is borrowed from English. |