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From: ludemann@ubc-cs.UUCP (Peter Ludemann)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Credibility
Message-ID: <1174@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 21-Jul-85 01:42:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: ubc-cs.1174
Posted: Sun Jul 21 01:42:21 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 25-Jul-85 07:06:06 EDT
References: <271@sri-arpa.ARPA> <483@oliveb.UUCP> <380@spar.UUCP> <130@ho95e.UUCP> <495@ihu1m.UUCP>
Reply-To: ludemann@ubc-cs.UUCP (Peter Ludemann)
Organization: UBC Department of Computer Science, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Lines: 28
Keywords: Japanese, spelling, alphabet

In article <495@ihu1m.UUCP> gadfly@ihu1m.UUCP (Gadfly) writes:
>--
>... I suppose the logical compromise
>is to have two alphabets.  The Japanese have been getting along
>quite nicely this way for quite some time.

You've got to be kidding.  First of all, the 'two alphabets' in 
Japanese - hiragana and katakana have the same sound values.  I'm
not going to get into their history, but modern usage is mainly to
use hiragana for Japanese words and katakana for foreign words (somewhat
like our italics).

Of course, you could be meaning the usage of the dreaded 'kanji' (that's
Chinese characters).  The high rate of Japanese literacy is in spite of
these, not because of them.  Korea has officially stopped using them
in order to promote literacy (and the Korean writing system is simpler than
the Japanese one, even with Chinese characters).

Just a few examples.  When the characters for the cities
Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe get combined, they become Kei-Han-Shin.
The two characters in 'Kyoto' can also both be pronounced 'miyako'
(they also both have the same meaning: capital city or metropolis).
I was once confused by a note a neighbour left me which contained
the characters 'one' and 'inch'.  I later found out it was not
pronounced 'issun' as it "should be", but 'chotto' and means 'just a little'.
I (and anyone else who's tried to learn Japanese) could go on and on.
Japanese orthography is one of the main stumbling blocks in my
study of the language.