I mean, this is not a politically correct statement, but I think one line of reasoning from this is to say that Chinese characters (which is what kanji are) are not a great way to write down language for practical purposes. A friend of mine in grad school irreverently referred to the Chinese writing system as "a really huge, really inefficient syllabary", and I think there's some truth to that. The characters no doubt have a certain beauty and their history is interesting, but a system where the meanings and pronunciations have to be learned totally separately seems to be inherently cumbersome in some ways. Even in a language like English which abuses the Latin alphabet in a notoriously messy manner, the amount of phonetic information that can be gleaned from the written form is fairly high, which gives two paths to the word (via memorized whole-word recognition or incremental sounding-out).
Overall you are probably correct, but there are certain benefits from the Chinese character system.
Long time ago I studied Japanese in Japan. On the way back to my home country I was sitting next to a bunch of Chinese people on the plane who did not speak any English or Japanese, but we were able to have a small conversation using Kanji/Chinese characters, because the characters' meanings are usually the same, although the languages are quite different. If the people would have been Greek and could not speak any English, no conversation would have been possible at all.
Another thing to mention is the radical system. Many Chinese characters consist of two or more characters, of which one is the "radical". This often helps you understand the broad meaning of the character in case you do not know it. For example, the Japanese character for fish is "魚". If you know that character and see another unknown character that used "fish" as a radical (for example "鮭"), you know that the character probably describes some kind of fish (in this case salmon). So it is not simply a huge list of "syllables".
I know almost nothing of Chinese languages, but some Japanese, and when I see boxes and instructions for some random item from Temu that is all in Chinese I'm amused by being able to understand bits of it.
I saw a face mask box that was all in Chinese and had 非医 on it (which means non-medical) which, depending on your font would be written exactly the same in Japanese: 非医.
> Overall you are probably correct, but there are certain benefits from the Chinese character system.
I mean yeah, it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. But consider this: 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. The French and German and Russians and Spanish could all do the same thing with their languages; 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.
Would you choose, post-facto, to add Chinese characters to English?
For my part, I'd say "no way". English orthography is already hard enough for my son to learn, without having to add characters on top of it.
ETA: Just for kicks, I asked Claude to try its hand at writing the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice in this manner:
It is a 真理 universally 認知ed, that a 単一 男 in 所有 of a good 財産 must be in 欲 of a 妻.
However 少 知n the 感情s or 見解s of such a 男 may be on his 最初 入ing a 近所, this 真理 is so 好 固定ed in the 心s of the 周囲 家族s, that he is 考慮ed as the 正当 財産 of some 一 or 他 of their 娘s.
"My 親愛 Mr. Bennet," 言ed his 夫人 to him 一日, "have you 聞ed that Netherfield Park is 貸 at 最後?"
Mr. Bennet 返答ed that he had 不.
"But it is," 戻ed she; "for Mrs. Long has 丁度 been here, and she 告ed me 全 about it."
Mr. Bennet 作 no 答.
"Do 不 you 欲 to 知 who has 取n it?" 叫ed his 妻, 不耐.
"You 欲 to 告 me, and I have no 反対 to 聞ing it."
> 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"]?
>>> 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").
> 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.
> 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.
> 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。
>have to be learned totally separately seems to be inherently cumbersome in some ways.
It also has quite big advantages. Because writing systems tend to be highly standardized meaning of most characters has changed relatively little, so Chinese people can read ancient texts with aid of a bit of classical Chinese. And this also works across space, China has a lot of mutually unintelligible spoken dialects but pretty much everyone can understand the meaning of written Chinese. And so can even Japanese or Korean people.
In contrast spoken language tends to change so quickly that phonetic writing systems can rapidly become completely unintelligible. Old English is practically a foreign language. Probably nobody understands that "Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum" means "Hey! We the Spear Danes, in years gone by".
The problem with these advantages is that most actual uses of words depend on some amount of context, and only a relatively small set of word+context combinations can actually work across languages that way. It is like the equivalent of doing a word-by-word translation.
Another way to put it is that this is essentially no longer "writing language", it's some alternate form of meaning representation. Language is not just a sequence of independent words.
It also affects the learning curve. English-speaking children can read far more advanced books earlier than equivalently educated Japanese.
They probably don't outweigh the disadvantages, but there are some small benefits. Once fluent, I think I remember Japanese to be slightly faster to read because of the more unique shapes. And you can make more flexible and elegant graphic text designs and tables (like in Excel) given the compact words and natural vertical writing.
My children are Japanese-English bilingual and can read far more advanced books in English. Initially I took this as an imbalance and suggested they read the same books (or something very close) in Japanese. But their native Japanese language teachers said, no, because of the different learning curves you can't expect them to read the same level of Japanese texts; the equivalently educated/advanced Japanese reader will be behind, at least in the elementary school years.
Japanese as a whole are extremely avid readers, so I don't think there's a gap at the top, only the shape of the learning curve.
