[thaumasiotes]

> and then when traveling, people could at a basic level read the signs and menus, and communicate at a basic level by writing, without having to know anything about the language

Well, you have to be careful; something that actually happened to me was recognizing that the first element of 牛蛙 meant "cow", without recognizing that the second part made it "bullfrog".

> We could do the same thing in English as in Japanese -- replace loads of letters with Chinese characters: Write "跑ing" instead of "running", and so on.

Interesting choice. Japanese doesn't do that - it follows classical Chinese by using the character 走 for the sense "run". 跑 is Chinese-specific.

> Just for kicks, I asked Claude to try its hand at writing the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice in this manner

This comes off weirdly to me because it's so Japanese. But I guess that was the idea. I have some particular questions:

>> this 真理 is so 好 固定ed in the 心s

I haven't checked on the English text, but it's difficult for me not to read this as "this truth is so well fixed in the hearts...". But I'm not sure that that sense of 好 is available in Japanese, where I'd expect it to be a verb meaning "like".

>> he is 考慮ed as the 正当 財産 of some 一 or 他 of their 娘s.

This doesn't appear to be a problem, but I still felt the need to call out what looks like the use of an exclusively masculine pronoun (in modern Chinese) to refer to "daughters".

>> Mr. Bennet 返答ed that he had 不.

This seems wrong; I feel sure that 未 would be more appropriate than 不.

>> Mr. Bennet 作 no 答.

This would appear to render the English "Mr. Bennet made no reply." I'm not comfortable with the use of 作; just because the word in the idiom is make doesn't mean that any making is involved.

Do you know whether Japanese use of kanji focuses more on establishing that a kanji corresponds to some Japanese syllables and using that kanji wherever those syllables occur [as suggested by "作 no 答"], or more on using kanji to represent certain semantics however those semantics might be pronounced [as might suggest "言 no 答"]?

[gwd]

>>> he is 考慮ed as the 正当 財産 of some 一 or 他 of their 娘s.

> This doesn't appear to be a problem, but I still felt the need to call out what looks like the use of an exclusively masculine pronoun (in modern Chinese) to refer to "daughters".

IIRC, in Japanese, 他 is sometimes used for "hoka", which means "other"; as in, "Do you have this item of clothing in other (他) sizes?" The original text says, "some one or other of their daughters"; so that seems to be Claude's thinking.

> Do you know whether Japanese use of kanji focuses more on establishing that a kanji corresponds to some Japanese syllables and using that kanji wherever those syllables occur [as suggested by "作 no 答"], or more on using kanji to represent certain semantics however those semantics might be pronounced [as might suggest "言 no 答"]?

I know a moderate amount of Mandarin (along with smatterings of Cantonese), and about 3 months' spare-time study of Japanese in preparation for a recent trip there. (Note the shopping theme in my example above.)

My expectation, which matches my (very small) experience, is that Japanese are trying to write Japanese; and that therefore they have Japanese words in mind that they're trying to represent with Chinese characters.

It is absolutely not the case that a given Chinese character will always be pronounced the same way in Japanese. For one, multi-character Chinese words are also munged into Japanese words. For two, even for single-syllable words there's a context: e.g,. Japanese has two different ways to say "one", but they use "一" for both. I'm sure I've run into other Chinese characters that are pronounced differently depending on whether they're in a verb or an adjective.

So for example:

> Mr. Bennet 返答ed that he had 不.

> Do 不 you 欲 to 知 who has 取n it?

Remember that we're discussing a hypothetical universe where English speakers use the Chinese characters, but the vast majority of them don't know Chinese.

In English we use "not" in both cases, even though in Mandarin in the first case I'd probably construct a sentence using "没" in the first instance and "不" in the second.

So what would happen in our hypothetical universe? Given that most speakers don't know Mandarin, using "不" in both cases is probably the simplest, most stable result. One could imagine complicated rules for whether you write "不", "没", or "未", which are taught in school and maintained, even though they're all read as "not", and even though most people don't know Mandarin. But it would have to be one of those things which (like Chinese characters themselves) people decided they liked about their writing system and didn't want to give up.

Similarly:

> I'm not comfortable with the use of 作; just because the word in the idiom is make doesn't mean that any making is involved.

And yet, in English, "made a cake" and "made no reply" have exactly the same verb. Again, one can imagine it going both ways, depending on how things were established and maintained: One could imagine using "作" in both cases; or one could imagine using two different characters for two different shades of meaning, just as in Chinese there's 他, 她, 它, and 祂; or perhaps 的 and 得 (which I'm not sure people would naturally consider different words if they were only exposed to the spoken word).

The real limitation here is that there's no way ready-made to indicate the "make" -> "made" transition, as you can with "makes" ("作s" ) and "making" ("作ing").

[thaumasiotes]

> I'm sure I've run into other Chinese characters that are pronounced differently depending on whether they're in a verb or an adjective.

The Japanese writing situation is much, much worse than that. Kanji get all kinds of different pronunciations on the theory that the semantics are the same. So the standard spelling of musume ["daughter"; "girl"] is 娘, but it might also be spelled 女. This gives you an alternative to the standard independent reading of 女, which is onna ["woman"]. All characters will also be pronounced differently when they represent Chinese loanwords than when they represent native words.

> And yet, in English, "made a cake" and "made no reply" have exactly the same verb. Again, one can imagine it going both ways

I agree with that.

> The real limitation here is that there's no way ready-made to indicate the "make" -> "made" transition, as you can with "makes" ("作s" ) and "making" ("作ing").

I don't agree with that; you'd do the same thing you do with every other preterite verb and write 作ed. You wouldn't pronounce that maked, but that's not a problem; we're still assuming that everybody knows English.

> IIRC, in Japanese, 他 is sometimes used for "hoka", which means "other"; as in, "Do you have this item of clothing in other (他) sizes?" The original text says, "some one or other of their daughters"

Yes, I determined something similar by looking the character up in a Japanese dictionary. I don't have the skills to determine what kinds of uses are and aren't natural, so I just decided that I couldn't label the usage wrong, but it still stood out as funny for other reasons. I was able to correctly read the English without referencing the original text.

I'm not sure what a "moderate amount of Mandarin" means; if it's on the lower end, you might be interested to know that the "other" sense does survive in Mandarin, in the words 其他 ["other"; extremely common] and 他人 ["other people"; not so common]. 他 by itself is going to be overwhelmed by the far more common use as a pronoun, I would guess.

> My expectation, which matches my (very small) experience, is that Japanese are trying to write Japanese; and that therefore they have Japanese words in mind that they're trying to represent with Chinese characters.

While I do agree that the situation could shake out in several ways, I don't think this is a total defense of the idea that "the same word" is going to be spelled the same way by people who don't know Chinese. I wouldn't expect, for example, that fire [flame] and fire [eliminate from a job] would get the same character spelling.

> One could imagine using "作" in both cases; or one could imagine using two different characters for two different shades of meaning, just as in Chinese there's 他, 她, 它, and 祂

By my understanding, 祂 is not a part of ordinary mainland usage. But this is a good example, in that there is no distinction between the words in the language, and Chinese people aren't able to make the distinction when learning a foreign language even though they do make it in writing their own. (By contrast, Spanish speakers don't have problems choosing between the English words he and she.)

You might also be interested to know that the character 做, pronounced identically to 作 and meaning the same thing, is in fact derived from 作. It (and not 作) is now the ordinary character used for the sense of making or doing. 作 is best known to me as part of the word 作者 "author". This is a pure spelling distinction that arose by some natural process within Mandarin.

> or perhaps 的 and 得 (which I'm not sure people would naturally consider different words if they were only exposed to the spoken word).

I can answer that; they don't. At least they don't for the 得 that introduces manner or result clauses; they might or might not think of the possibility infix seen in 听得了 "able to listen" as different.

[gwd]

> I'm not sure what a "moderate amount of Mandarin" means; if it's on the lower end, you might be interested to know that the "other" sense does survive in Mandarin, in the words 其他 ["other"; extremely common] and 他人 ["other people"; not so common]. 他 by itself is going to be overwhelmed by the far more common use as a pronoun, I would guess.

I had a snippet about how 他 was made up of 也 and 人, "also a person", but ended up editing it out, as I wasn't sure it was actually connected w/ Japanese using it to mean "other". "他人" is still about people, but I had forgotten 其他, which is clearly not specific to people.

At any rate, there's a lot of ways our hypothetical universe could go, WRT how such a 汉字 writing system would be incorporated into English. The point is, there's always a silver lining: It would certainly have some benefits, like making it possible for literate English-speakers to get around in China and Japan w/o learning anything about the local languages and vice versa (with some of the "false friend" [1] traps you've mentioned above -- but those are issues between European languages as well).

But on the whole, I'd consider the cost not worth the benefits by a long shot.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend

[thaumasiotes]

> I had a snippet about how 他 was made up of 也 and 人, "also a person", but ended up editing it out, as I wasn't sure it was actually connected w/ Japanese using it to mean "other".

Well, I don't think it's true, either. As I understand it, the form 他 is just a graphical simplification of 佗, with no connection to the character 也. (You can think of this as similar to how the left-hand component in 脸 is 肉, not 月.) It isn't clear to me either that the character 也 would have held any sense of "also" when the form 他 appeared, though this is a question I'm agnostic on.

I've watched several videos on youtube in which someone presents Japanese people with uncommon kanji and asks them to read them, or failing that to speculate on what they might say. The Japanese unfailingly speculate that both halves of a compound character are relevant to the meaning, which surprises me - it's very rare for a character to be constructed from two meaningful parts. Far more common are the characters in which one part gestures at the meaning and the other part tells you the pronunciation, and 佗 is one of those. 从人它聲。