[lojban] Re: eastern languages

[tijlan <picos.picos@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 6:00 AM, Seo Sanghyeon <sanxiyn@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/9/29 Chris Capel <pdf23ds@gmail.com>:
>> I mean, Japan's othography system(s) scares me to death, but maybe a
>> cumbersome orthography doesn't bug a logically-minded person as much
>> as a cumbersome grammar does. And other eastern countries have
>> reformed orthographies or (maybe?) haven't used ideographs in
>> centuries or more. But I don't really know much about those.
>
> I am a native Korean speaker, and can do some Japanese.
>
> Japanese orthography sucks. No question. In general ideographs suck.
> Thankfully, Korean orthography does not suck. It is a beautiful work.


I'm a native Japanese and French speaker. I must point out that
Japanese orthography has its own advantages. For one thing, it allows
you scanning/skimming texts pretty faster, as you instantly
distinguish ideographs (ideas) from syllabaries (structures).
Katakana, a syllabary, also happens to be as semantically rich as
Kanji, as it mostly represents loan words, concepts, rather than
syntactic elements. An example:

僕は サラダを 食べた (Boku-wa Salada-o Ta-beta)
mi pu citka lo salta

"僕", "サラダ", and "食" all represent the sentence's basic conceptual
items, "mi", "salta", and "citka". For native Japanese speakers, the
distinction of such semantic components from syntactic components is
mostly intuitive (after all, every Kanji is basically pictorial and
intuitional). It can be as instantaneous as making them out in:

僕 pu 食 lo サラダ .imu'ibo le 母 cu 強 望 la'e di'u
（僕は サラダを 食べた。なぜなら 母さんが それを 強く望んだから。）

as opposed to:

mi pu citka lo salta .imu'ibo le mamta cu bapli djica la'e di'u
（ぼくは さらだを たべた。なぜなら かあさんが それを つよく のぞんだから。）

It can significantly save you time going through "less important"
letters/words for the purpose of understanding the text's gist.
(Interestingly, these examples show how Kanji quite corresponds to
brivla and Hiragana to ma'ovla. Katakana should then correspond to
either fu'ivla or cmevla.)

In purely alphabetical languages, you have to first analyse the
sequence of the uniform letters in order to *see* the semantic
landscape of a text. In Japanese orthography, such an analytic process
is in most cases unnecessary.

I wouldn't say the orthography is flawless, but neither would I say it sucks.

As for Korean (alphabetical) orthography, I like it. I find it
beautiful and easy to learn. But it's not without a certain systemic
problem, especially after it did away with the Chinese characters or
Hanja (한자). It has left numerous homonyms unable to distinguish apart
without contextual reference. The Vietnamese orthography, no longer
using the Chinese characters too, seems more successful than Hangul,
probably because the language's own complex phonology has greatly if
not perfectly prevented homonym. There are little controversy among
Vietnamese over continuing with their current orthography, whereas in
(South) Korea a pro-Hanja movement is noticeable. On the other hand,
some Koreans seem to think too highly of Hangul to the point where
they argue (as on the "world's largest" Japanese internet forum,
2channel) that it can represent "any" sound of "any" language, which
simply isn't true (for instance, it doesn't have a letter for [f]
apart from the substitutive /ㅍ/, and /ㄹ/ doesn't distinguish between
[l] and [r]).



mu'o mi'e tijlan