Challenge: Japan fully adopts the Roman Alphabet?
- Thread starter Andrela
- Start date
Don't even think this is necessary. As Japan westernizes, just have Japan go that extra step (like Turkey) and abandon its historic script(s) and adopt a version of the Latin alphabet.
Delta Force
Banned
I made a similar thread on this a few weeks ago. Apparently Japan had a rather high literacy rate even by Western standards during the Meiji Period, so it actually would have been more difficult to teach literate people a new alphabet than to teach illiterate people the existing one.
There's not even need for that - it could work as an outgrowth of a period of digraphia, where the alphabet concerned is an adaptation of the Portuguese alphabet. This actually has precedent, in that the Vietnamese alphabet is largely an outgrowth of 15th-century Portuguese orthography, helped along with some Italian spelling conventions and usage by the Vietnamese themselves. Then again, in this case the earliest examples would best fit Late Middle Japanese.
Not going to happen; Japan by the point of the PoD was a unified nation-state, has a geography making it incredibly difficult to take, a very large population, ALOT of guns and arms factories (Japan at one point in the 18th century had more guns than all of Europe), plus light industry and the very beginnings of some heavier industry.
Turkey only adopted a Western script because Ataturk forced it on the country, being a revolutionary zealot who loathed the Ottoman state and essentially was forcefully creating a national identity.
usertron2020
Donor
Agreed. Japanese is a language hugely dependent on tone and inflection, in which meaning can be lost or at least misinterpreted if a message is being sent via, say, old fashioned telex.
Just because you use a Latin alphabet, it doesn't mean that spellings have to be phonetic. English has plenty of examples of homonyms where the spellings are different - read/red, read/reed, ring/wring, wait/weight, no/know etc.
Cheers,
Nigel.
Indeed.
I think that native English speakers sometimes understimate just how many homonyms there are in their language, and even worse, how many words are pronounced differently only by a tiny inflection on one of the sounds. To a non-native, spoken English can be sometimes hard to get. Specially in some dialects...
Japanese can be much worse, i don't know. But even if you go after a phonetic transliteration, the Latin script has enough letters to allow different spellings for homophone words (specially having in account that Japanese has, to my knowledge, way less sounds than English).
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My primary point is that whereas in English these homonyms are distinguished by spelling AND part of speech, in Japanese, spelling distinguishes them in kanji writing (but not kana writing), but quite often, the part of speech is the same. As a random example, there are four different nouns that would normally be romanised as "kami", no matter which established romanisation scheme you consider.
While getting Japan to adopt the Latin alphabet is conceivable, getting them to then also adopt an intentionally irregular spelling convention is pure ASB territory.
I would'nt say it has alot fewer sounds, I mean yes, traditionally Japanese does'nt have the L sound and I think one other, but apart from that..
Japanese has sh and s, but doesn't distinguish between them. It has f an h, but doesn't distinguish between them. It has no v, and traditionally had no p either (the p is a relatively new sound). It doesn't distinguish n and ng, and at the end of a syllable, n and m are considered the same too. It lacks diphthongs and triphthongs (or at least, doesn't distinguish between a genuine diphthong and those same two component vowels next to each other, as English can). It lacks any th sound (either voiced or unvoiced). There is only one option for syllables ending with consonants (unlike English, which has almost two dozen options).
So, yeah. It has a smaller sound library to use.
I recall a story about the Occupation (to push past the subforum limit). As part of the reforms of Japanese society, one adviser proposed that the Japanese discard the kanji, the Chinese characters used in Japanese writing, and use instead hiragana, their own syllabary
General MacArthur thought that an interesting idea, and gave a speech suggesting such. The newspapers printed the speech (in translation, of course). With kanji. The General-san was a cultured person, and cultured persons use kanji.
I've also heard that Japanese can be written adequately using romaji (Roman letters). Sinic languages -- Putonghua ("Mandarin"), Yue ("Cantonese"), and the like are more tonal. How do tone-deaf people do speaking those languages, by the way?
General MacArthur thought that an interesting idea, and gave a speech suggesting such. The newspapers printed the speech (in translation, of course). With kanji. The General-san was a cultured person, and cultured persons use kanji.
I've also heard that Japanese can be written adequately using romaji (Roman letters). Sinic languages -- Putonghua ("Mandarin"), Yue ("Cantonese"), and the like are more tonal. How do tone-deaf people do speaking those languages, by the way?
I'm vaguely curious, judging from some of the posts in this thread, as to how many of these posters read, write, or speak even a little Japanese.
The story is remarkably silly, of course the translation used kanji; because kanji was an integral part of the Japanese language at the time (and still is), and not reading kanji made you not uncultured, but illiterate. There's actually a number of good reasons kanji was only simplified, not abolished.
Also, I shouldn't think a tone-deaf person would have any trouble speaking a Sinic language, tone refers to an inflection, not a volume or pitch.
The story is remarkably silly, of course the translation used kanji; because kanji was an integral part of the Japanese language at the time (and still is), and not reading kanji made you not uncultured, but illiterate. There's actually a number of good reasons kanji was only simplified, not abolished.
Also, I shouldn't think a tone-deaf person would have any trouble speaking a Sinic language, tone refers to an inflection, not a volume or pitch.
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This is not the only reason Turkey shifted to Latin alphabet. Ottoman Turkish used to be written using Arabic letters, which
- is just as foreign as Latin,
- is an abjad (= consonants only) and therefore ill-suited to writing Turkish, which has such a thing as vowel harmony,
- made importing typewriters quite difficult.
(Plus, removing people one more step from the Coran was probably a good side-effect from Atatürk's point of view).
Of course, they could have gone the full way and used e and ä in place of ı and e: this would have been even more compatible with Western European (specifically, German) pronunciation, and would have saved quite a lot of headaches about capitalization...
tone and inflection can be, to a certain point, represented by diacritics so that (jut for the sake of example) " shi " & " shî " could be told apart. You could even use a combination of diacritics and variant spelling to represent homonyms: " shi " , " shih " , " shee " .
Possibilities within my idea:
*The 15th-century Portuguese orthography, whilst somewhat reasonably phonetic, wasn't perfect and there were variations even within the orthography (i.e. should "língua" (language) be spelled "lingoa", "lengoa", "lengua", or "lingua", all of which are attested in the manuscripts?), so whatever Japanese is transcribed would be as a Portuguese person would hear and understand it. Of course, too, Portuguese orthography would be heavily affected by the Renaissance in the 15th-17th centuries, which only complicates the spelling even more as silent Latin and Ancient Greek letters are brought back and thus making etymology the main determiner in spelling (until 1911 in OTL, where a major spelling reform in Portugal under the Republic brought back phonology as a main determinant, thus i.e. transforming "bahia" to "baía", "columna" to "coluna", and more extremely the Brazilian state of "Goyaz" to "Goiás").
*The reflection of Japanese Roman writing under this proposal would be Late Middle Japanese, and since written languages are inherently conservative the representation of grammar and the sounds would reflect that even with spelling reforms here and there. In this case, it's no different from Vietnamese in OTL, where their writing system largely reflects Middle Vietnamese (since that was the period when the first Latin-script material was produced, particularly Father Alexandre de Rhodes' dictionary) despite all sorts of spelling reforms and the like. So there's that factor to keep in mind.
*Sino-Japanese, to some, would indeed constitute an obstacle, but the main point to keep in mind is that often time a mixture of context and compounding would probably help. At the same time, there would be an increase in the use of native Japanese words (since ideally the writing system would work if the writing was truly vernacular), so compounding native Japanese words and Sino-Japanese words with the same meaning to create one word could help on one hand. Use of international vocabulary would also help. In reality, however, the homonyms would not constitute a major problem as one would think.
This.
Vietnamese's law: given enough diacritics, any language can be rendered in the Latin alphabet.
Of course, this is only the technical answer, and the more interesting question is political. I think that the XIXth century is far too late and the last possible POD is a much deeper penetration of Christianity, with Jesuits bringing Bibles (not only the Protestants were strong in Bibles, but also the Jesuits with all their emphasis on education).