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Comment by bgee | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: native Chinese speaker, knows some Japanese, English sufferer

Putting aside the argument of whether removing all Hanzi from Japanese text would actually be more efficient or not, the question to me is: why stop at Hanzi? Why not romanizating all the Japanese literature? Surely almost all the reasoning in favor of getting rid of Hanzi can also apply here?

edit: grammar

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> Why not romanizating all the Japanese literature? Surely almost all the reasoning in favor of getting rid of Hanzi can also apply here?

The difference is that removing kanji from Japanese profoundly changes it, in that tons and tons of words that were previously distinct become indistinguishable. Hence people arguing about getting rid of kanji are arguing about the benefits of the language being easier to learn, vs. the drawbacks of having huge masses of distinct words that are all written the same way.

Whereas, using kana vs. romanization isn't really an important distinction. Nobody argues which is better because they're basically equivalent; anyone who knows one could learn the other in a matter of days or weeks.

Kana are more directly phonemic than any romanization method, and not difficult for any foreigner to learn. If we want a single universal alphabet then we should be looking to something more like IPA - or at least something that would involve a radically simplified orthography for english. But really the details of which alphabet one chooses are much less important than the decision to use an alphabet/syllabary at all rather than an ideographic system.

That's essentially what Korean did. They replaced everything with their own morphophonemic orthography.

But even then they still use Hanja to disambiguate sometimes.

I was not even talking about Hangul, the point I made was on using a Latin alphabet. If we are revamping the whole writing system, why reinvent the wheel if the main goal is "efficiency"?

edit: obviously Kana has already been created

There have been notable Japanese people who argued that the Japanese writing system should adopt Latin alphabets since ~150 years ago.

https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AD%E3%83%BC%E3%83%9E%...

I'm personally fine with both romaji and kana (learning kana is not a big cognitive burden anyways).

I'm even fine with kanji (or Latin or anything) if people learn it voluntarily. What's not ok is kids being forced to learn them in school.

I'm pretty sure this (or at least sticking to kana) was attempted shortly after 1945 but was abandoned because of the sheer number of homophones.

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