Challenge: Japan fully adopts the Roman Alphabet?

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 " .

While Chinese is tonal and could benefit from diacritics in a consistent manner, this doesn't apply to Japanese, which lacks such tones and inflections. The nearest thing to this is vowel length, which is already represented in most romanisation schemes, and still fails to distinguish between homonyms.

Another random example: the verb "oru" can mean any of:

exist
break
fold
pick (a flower etc.)
weave

And "sasu"...

insert
point
pour
shine
strike

Without kanji, or the extra context normally present in spoken communication, it's a lot harder to distinguish these. And teh pronunciation is not noticeably different for any of these homonyms, so any orthography differences will be very arbitrary.

Given that Japanese already had established orthographic rules by first contact with Europe, they simply wouldn't adopt for their own purposes an irregular scheme. While a foreign power might use an irregular scheme to write Japanese, that would not be adopted by the Japanese, unless Japan was essentially made into a puppet state first.

(I am actually fluent in Japanese)
 
@Ashtagon: You might be interested in this article about the Dungan language, which under the Soviet Union began using Cyrillic script. It's pretty interesting, and does deal a bit with their so-called homophone problem.
http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/dungan.html

I'm no expert on Dungan, but it appears to be an entirely different language family from Japanese. If it's language structures are anything like Chinese, there isn't any particular reason I am aware of (in terms of language structures; cultural inertia is another matter) that would prevent it from being written with an alphabet. There is already one home-grown Chinese alphabet (bopomofo), and multiple romanisation schemes, at least one of which actually does a decent job so I am told.

ETA: Also, The Dungan people are for all intents and purposes a conquered people, and so it is entirely unsurprising that their conqueror's alphabet would be used - moreso, considering certain Soviet leaders had a policy of intentionally imposing Cyrillic alphabet on the entire USSR. An ATL in which Japan was conquered and integrated by a Western power would satisfy this condition. Geography and communications technolohgy more or less prevents that happening prior to the 20th century though.
 
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