Why Japan Can't Quit the Fax Machine

washingtonpost.com

2 pointsa5seo3 comments

This article seems to imply that part of the reason is that Japanese has 3 sets of symbols for the sounds in their language, which makes typing difficult.

Why does Japanese use 3 sets of symbols for their spoken language? (Hiragana for native words, Katakana for foreign words, Kanji due to China's proximity?) Why not reduce to one set of symbols?

As this poorly-informed outsider understands it, the bulk of writing is kanji, which is sort of equated with literacy, and hiragana is only used to spell out words which don't have kanji or to accommodate children (or maybe foreigners?) who are still learning kanji. I don't know why katakana hasn't been eclipsed by hiragana.

I wonder how much of this is due to the complaints that Japanese was not well served by Unicode's Han unification. I would have liked the article to touch on that.

An interesting insight into a culture that normally has a reputation for being far ahead of the curve in adopting new technologies.

Also kind of makes me think about how there must be a lot of software, and a lot of code out there written in other languages that has no real visibility in the west at all. Interesting thought.

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