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Comment by miguelpais | Hacker News Reader

How can it be the end of, for instance, Kanji if the whole language relies on it?

You probably know that when a Kanji character is written in hiragana or katakana, you have no clue of the true meaning, it can be many different things. So how can it end without disrupting the whole language?

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Japanese people don't need to see the kanji when, say, a news story is being read to them. They figure it out from context like everyone else. I'm pretty sure they could switch over to using hiragana and katakana or even romaji exclusively without much trouble if they wanted to. To some extent this is already happening as more foreign words for things are being adopted. They don't waste time trying to come up with Kanji for every new concept or device but instead they just create a Japanized pronunciation of it in katakana and be done with it.

Spoken Japanese has tone to disambiguate words, though. And "context" is overrated. It's not uncommon to have reasonably long conversations where you think you're communicating, only to find out that your conversations were entirely parallel.

___ ga? (Asking if they're talking about ___) is perhaps the most useful Japanese phrase I know, given that a Japanese sentence often contains neither subject nor topic.

> It's not uncommon to have reasonably long conversations where you think you're communicating, only to find out that your conversations were entirely parallel.

I suspect this is not unique to japanese. I bet this happens a lot in all languages. Especially during arguments.

I don't doubt you, but it's a lot easier when, grammatically, you don't have to include the thing you're talking about in the conversation.

Incidentally, the incident I was thinking about wasn't an argument at all. Kklein posted a funny one to Slashdot ages ago about his Japanese wife continuing a conversation from they day before (using the topic of their old conversation without stating it), but I can't seem to drag it out of Google right now.

Actually I disagree with the news story notion. News programs in Japanese are always subtitled with text, quoting and sometimes paraphrasing what the reporter is talking about. There are ten tons of homonyms in Japanese, and inflected regional dialects.

I don't think the bastardized Katakana-ization of foreign words helps. What is encouraging is that new sounds are making their way slowly into the language, particularly the distinction between "b" and "v" that's beginning to emerge, at least for loan words.

The subtitles thing is just a custom. I find it amazing that people believe the Japanese need subtitles in order to understand spoken Japanese. How the hell would the Japanese listen to news radio if they needed subtitles?

Well, once upon a time I started noticing people speaking regional dialects 'translated' into standard Japanese. I think they do serve the utility of making things a little easier to understand, at least in some cases.

News story was probably a bad example, but how about say blind people using Japanese braille which appears to be completely phonetic? Or how about the fact that furigana are often printed to aid people (e.g children) in determining how to read the Kanji, even for standard Kanji? Certainly Kanji can help after you know them but is it actually necessary?

I don't disagree with those examples, and I can't pretend to sympathize with a blind Japanese person reading Braille, for example.

I do think that Japanese is an extremely complex language, and ability to recognize characters and vocabulary are closely intertwined. Kanji is entrenched, but is it necessary? Probably not strictly speaking.

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