This feels like the textbook case of the Dunning-Kruger effect, where someone with passing or moderate familiarity with a language suddenly knows better than everyone that uses it in their daily life, and thinks that rearranging it in a way that better suits them is somehow a good idea for others.
In saying "I do know Japanese" you make me wonder. Language being first and foremost a spoken entity, you are completely ignoring the cases like /dɛs/ in standard Tokyo Japanese where a word ends in a consonant, and also ignoring the many cases where there are geminate consonants within a word, or at the juncture of two words. If you don't already know these examples, your knowledge of Japanese is insufficient. (In giving the example of final nasal n, I'm afraid you are following the religion of traditional Japanese phonetics. Please don't be misled by that hoary tradition.) I won't give further examples because these may be used in a forthcoming book which may inform other readers ignorant of such things about their existence. If you listen carefully to a lot more spoken Japanese, you may see what I mean…
It's too bad we'll have to wait for your next self-published book to learn about "dropped vowels" other than "desu," the most common example that any layperson could (and often does) observe. Are you aware that this vowel isn't dropped, but simply devoiced? There are several threads on this forum that discuss this phenomenon (
@Toritoribe shared just one of them), which isn't even universally applied throughout all Japanese dialects, so your understanding of how the language works is stunted and neglects non-standard dialects you are apparently unfamiliar with. Would they just need to "fall in line" to fit into your proposed solution? I suggest you run your theories by a phonologist and see how far you get.
I'm still waiting for an explanation of "way" vs. "weigh," or "wait" for "weight," or "waste" and "waist," or "wane" and "Wayne" for that matter. There's a reason English is the only language with a spelling bee, and it's not because it's a well-organized phonetic system. To suggest it as a model for other languages would
compound rather than
simplify the issues in that language, and only seem intended to serve people like yourself.
If you do not know that desu drops its final vowel in spoken standard Japanese, then either your ear is not well-trained, or you are simply arguing from the standpoint of kana hyôki. Your allegation regarding "the argument that someone hasn't learned Japanese" is totally unfounded. 90% of the time I speak nothing but fluent Japanese, read and write Japanese, have taught in Japanese at university level for 30 years – so know the language as well as a regular well-educated Japanese person, which de facto I am. Not to recognise that fact would be pure racism… which of course is rampant in the US more than most places. Of course I would do not deny that racism is a fairly common human trait – but nonetheless one which Americans are unusually fond of. If you are in fact yourself American, then I would hope to hear no further from you. The level of scholarship at the top US universities these days is deplorable. Fortunately, it was not always so, and I have a good number of excellent American colleagues. But they are mostly at least 70 years old.
In saying "90% of the time I speak nothing but fluent Japanese, read and write Japanese, have taught in Japanese at university level for 30 years – so know the language as well as a regular well-educated Japanese person, which de facto I am." You make me wonder... Perhaps you could respond to Toritoribe's comments so we can all be wowed by your fluency, you do realize that Japanese dictation works quite well, don't you?
LOL it's "pure racism" not to recognize you as a "de facto well-educated Japanese person," but also, if we're American, you don't want to hear any more from us!
This is great stuff! Nothing like attacking someone based on their identity rather than address the ideas they put forth, you must be a real joy to share an office with.
The transcription of Japanese is not really a specialty of mine – just a long time interest.
So you admit that you're just an amateur using your credentials in a tangential field as a smokescreen to create an appeal to authority?
BTW, there is no such thing as a "native speaker". It's simply a misnomer which has become too widely adopted, rather like COVID-19. If no one can be born speaking a particular language, then there surely can be no such thing as a native speaker. ( I believe this may be an American term, which stands to reason. There are such things as "Native Americans" after all, In the good old US of A. Anyone born in America is a Native American, so the term is another misnomer. The term indigenous would be much better.
WOW we're doubling down are we? You do realize that "native speaker" refers to people who grew up speaking the language in question. Literally no one is saying that anyone is born speaking a language; that's a strawman argument. If you're only capable of understanding words literally, then life as a linguist must be very difficult for you indeed. I shudder to imagine what you think "mother tongue" refers to. If you DO understand what "native speaker" refers to but insist someone use an unpopular term like "indigenous speaker" then you sound like an insufferable pedant.
If we really wanted to write out languages phonetically, we could just use IPA (which I think would be widely beneficial for all people interested in language to learn), The downside to switching to IPA, of course, is that a truly phonetic writing system would rather de-standardize the spelling structure of a language as everyone would be writing in their own accents; this would create issues for the reader who is unfamiliar with the writer's particular speech patterns. Languages evolve and change over time and geographical barriers, and any attempt to standardize will eventually fall victim to entropy as people seek to personalize their speech patterns: a language written truly phonetically can only hope to
describe and not
dictate the language as it's spoken. But you seem to be proposing we use some version of Vietnam's
Chữ Quốc Ngữ, some kind of weird hybrid of your own making, perhaps?
As far as the comments of the Moderator concerned, he/she is apparently not acquainted with the actual sounds produced in standard Japanese speech. Many of these cannot be represented by the kana syllabaries. at 10 he/she is possibly wedded to traditional Japanese phonetics, which would explain the unwillingness to hear the actual sounds of the language we were discussing. These can only be happier presented by the alphabet or some other more finely chained instrument. Kana, after all, have not even progressed to the stage of distinguishing isolated consonants from vowels. That puts them on A level with the Sumerian script of around 3000 BC. of course they were very useful to Heian Period writers, but they are by no means sophisticated enough to cope with contemporary Japanese.
You don't seem familiar with the concept of mora... Aside from mistakenly eliding devoiced vowels, which I mentioned above, what purpose would be served by splitting kana into distinct consonant and vowel components? I guess you'd end up with some distinctly Japanese form of Korean Hangeul or Taiwanese Bopomofo, which might slightly reduce the overall number of characters, but at the expense of completely reinventing the wheel and re-educating an entire population.
While I am not a hundred percent sure that a switch to the alphabet would work for all applications, it certainly would work for every day use – saving a great deal of time, particularly when you consider the convoluted method of inputting Japanese kana-majiri on a keyboard. The other great advantage would be that English borrowings in their original spelling, which would be very helpful for Japanese school students. If borrowings are left in katakana transcription b, you can say goodbye to English in Japan – except for that specially gifted 5% who go to the trouble of repeatedly watching videos, listening to songs, et cetera, and thereby becoming fluent. These people are of course very precious.
BTW, I dictate rather than typing, partly because it's faster and partly because of arthritis. Switching to the alphabet for Japanese would presumably also facilitate dictation – which is a great convenience.
Japanese has its problems, but your proposal does a poor job at addressing them in any realistic or meaningful way, and introduces a whole new slew of issues. ESL/EFL students (not to mention indigenous speakers) already struggle with English spelling, and you intend to leave English (or perhaps all foreign) loan-words in their original spelling when written in Japanese, rather than writing them phonetically using Japanese's admittedly limited syllabary. Again, how is this supposed to make things EASIER for Japanese students to learn JAPANESE? To put your idea on its head, this is akin to saying that we should never write "sushi," it should only be written 寿司, for the sake of Japanese speakers. Do you not see how egocentric you appear? Again, I would ask you to reevaluate your goals, and who this is all intended to serve.
Written words are a stand-in for the concept of the word in our mind; when I am reading in English I don't have to sound out words to understand them, and in fact it's the general shape and length of the word that we read, which is shown by some interesting studies that rearrange the letters within words without impacting legibility. Truly phonetic writing like IPA is helpful to learn how to pronounce things, but aside from the issues I mentioned above, without a great deal of exposure and practice to the
particular spelling of a word there is a speed bump between seeing and recognizing the meaning of the word. This happens in Japanese too: if I see an English word written in katakana that I haven't seen before, I may need to sound out the word until I recognize what it's intended to say; once I realize that コーヒー is "coffee," and that it's pronounced /ko:hi:/, I can map the Japanese pronunciation to the concept I already understand in English, and from then on I don't have to "sound out" the word, but simply recognize it. It's not as common but learning to recognize 珈琲 as another permutation of this is a relatively simple connection to add on; I don't even really need to know how to write the kanji, just recognize the word. As an added bonus in this case, I've then learned how to recognize the word that means "coffee" in Chinese, although I'd need to learn the Chinese pronunciation to be able to ask for it out loud. I could at least recognize it on a menu and point to it, which is good enough to order, or I could learn the phrase "how to say" and point to it, and BOOM, new knowledge required.
Ideograms are an amazing brain hack because with kanji we can actually bridge language barriers and understand written words that may be pronounced completely differently, as exemplified by Chinese and its dialects. I had a Malaysian friend in college who was already familiar with kanji, and spoke both Mandarin and Cantonese (Japanese would've been his 5th or 6th language); he showed me how written Chinese could be read in different dialects. To learn Japanese he only needed to map new pronunciations to those characters to read out loud, but once he got the hang of kana and Japanese grammar, his reading comprehension was head and shoulders above the rest of us. If anything, this makes a great case for a WIDER adoption of kanji/hanzi. Unless you're magically able to standardize the way millions or billions of people speak, what you propose is incredibly narrow-minded and hubristic.
It's ok to be ignorant, but at some point you must admit that ignorance if you expect to learn and grow out of that ignorance. I understand this is particularly difficult for someone with your bona fides, and after 5 decades in a country I too would probably expect that I would have a grip on things; to the point that my apparent expertise on my adopted country might be something my ego clings to as an integral part of my identity. But you should probably let go of the notion that you know better than Japanese people about how their own language should be structured.
@S. MacObicin you are either a brilliant satirist, or an earnest fool. Either way, great trolling.
