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This is a common misconception until you study the language seriously. Japanese nominally has only 50 sounds, known as mora. In practice there are more because people smush them together, but this tends to be for very common words or dialectical variations by region. There are also spoken pitch markers, but they don't have any written indicia. Because there is such a small number of basic sounds, homophony (words with the same pronunciation but different meanings) is absolutely rampant. This is not too big of a problem when speaking because the context is usually obvious, but writing anything abstract using phonetic script alone will quickly become problematic. It's also tedious to read long texts in phonetic script in the same way that it's tedious to read lots of upper case text in the Latin alphabet. Another language feature is that Japanese compound words are often formed by just taking 1 or 2 more from several longer words. This would be like shortening 'American-Russian diplomacy' to 'amru diplomacy'. Very clear when written with specific characters, confusing if it is just phonetic. Then, word pronunciation changes within compounds, eg 川 kawa means river, but 山川 yamagawa is mountain river, and these changes are ubiquitous, probably 95% of words go through this phonetic alteration when folded into another word. It gets more complex again because there are so many particles, words that indicate grammatical inflection of some kind and can drastically change the meaning of a sentence if you use the wrong one. The most common ones are just a single mora and most others are just two. But there are lots of particles. 10-15 essential ones, ~30 that are used all the time, ~65 you need to know for fluency, and more that 150 you might come across in written form. I could go on and on. The basic reason for all this is that Japanese is fundamentally different from other languages because it developed on islands, and because the weather patterns around those islands made sailing in and out more difficult than islands in calmer latitudes separated by greater distances. They adopted Chinese characters because they didn't have a written language at the time they encountered them, then adapted those characters to develop the phonetic scripts. There's a huge amount of technical debt that would be impossible to unravel. Do it like Korea Korean has more different sounds, eg 14 consonant and 10 vowel sounds, vs ~10 consonant sounds and 5 vowel sounds in Japanese. You could also argue there was a higher level of literacy over a longer period, but that requires a lot of history and geography explanation to support - the point being that it would have been much harder to impose by imperial fiat unless it had been done much earlier. |