Re: intrinsic advantage of Latin alphabet over bopomofo (for Chinese)??

On Mar 13, 2:51 pm, hru...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Herman Rubin) wrote:
In article <rqqhag0qru1n....@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Oliver Cromm <lispamat...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:





* Richard Herring wrote:
In message <et2e6c$1...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Herman Rubin
<hru...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
In article <IM+4mRHwWT8FF...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Richard Herring <richard.herr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In message <esps2e$...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Herman Rubin
<hru...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
If Kana is adequate for Japanese, the small syllabary
involved would certainly be better for writing the
language.
Yet they insist on writing it with kanji. Why might that be, do you
think?
This one I happen to know. After the surrender in 1945,
it was seriously suggested that they get rid of the kanji
for other than reading old documents. But that was
rejected as "uncultured".
Nothing to do with disambiguating homophones, then?
But you're right about the "uncultured" argument, though that might be a
mistranslation of something more like "anti-cultural". It's so much a
part of the culture that abandoning kanji isn't "uncultured", it's
unthinkable.
Yeah, it's like asking Americans to give up cars.

This is not at all similar. Notice that I said, "If Kana
is adequate for Japanese"; in that case, giving up kanji
would be like making the transition from ideographic writing
to alphabetic writing, which most written languages have
done without loss of clarity or ease of writing.

"Written languages" are not "ideographic," syllabic, or anything else.

Most writing systems never "gave up" logograms (i.e., kanji), because
most writing systems never had logograms. Only cuneiform, Egyptian,
Chinese, and Maya had them, and none of them "gave them up" during
their entire history of use.

.

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