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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3514 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 14, 2025

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speaking as a language nerd I'd rather they adapted something like Korean Hangul instead

Speaking as another self-identified language nerd, hell nah. The survival of the Sinosphere arrangement of one common ideographic writing system functioning, if imperfectly, for multiple distinct languages simultaneously - distributing the translation load between the act of writing and the act of reading in such a way that both can be performed somewhat on the fly - is precious, and I could rant at lengths about how much of a tragedy I see in Vietnam's ditching of Han Nom and Korea's almost-complete ditching of hanja. We have reports of 19th century Japanese who could travel to Vietnam and "talk" to literate elders in writing, without either making a single sound the other could parse!

As a third self-identified language nerd, I'm largely with you. I think Hangul is an interesting and unique writing system, and certainly more efficient than a syllabary like Japanese Kana, but I do wish that both Korean and Vietnamese used a hybrid script system analogous to Japanese with 1000-2000 characters for Hanzi derived words and the rest in their respective phonetic system. Korean and Japanese in particular have a frustrating amount of homophones due to the dropping of tones that could use the disambiguation. I wouldn't mind if the Chinese did the same from the other direction, though would prefer something like Zhuyin over Pinyin in such a case for largely aesthetic reasons.

Korean mixed script exists and has nice and quirky properties.

Korean and Japanese in particular have a frustrating amount of homophones due to the dropping of tones that could use the disambiguation

I thought Japanese solved the issue of homophones with pitch accent. Many of the more famous examples are clearly distinguishable, to the extent that I feel like "homophones" is a misnomer. Regardless, I don't think need tones for disambiguation and nor am I aware of that they ever had tones, unlike the more mixed situation in Korea.

The pitch accent has far from enough information to actually disambiguate heavily-overloaded phoneme sequences, especially with projected-down Chinese vocabulary. One of the more well-known pairs is 科学 (subject-learning = science) and 化学 (change-learning = chemistry), both read identically as kagaku with a down-pitch after the ka. In an informal context (like students chatting about what they are doing), people often resort to deliberately misreading the latter as bakegaku, essentially just pronouncing the "change" bit using a slightly amusing native reading (bake- is "change" with a heavy connotation of "shapeshift", like masters of disguise), perhaps similar to saying "Lifeology" for "Biology". (Imagine a scenario in which this word was overloaded in English, with "Bi-ology" denoting the study of things that come in twos)

Once you get to heavily overloaded sound sequences like koukai, my dictionary gives over a dozen of words that are read as that with no down-step (like 公開, "publicise", or 更改, "revise"), and at least two that have that reading with a downstep after the ko (後悔, "regret", and 航海, travelling the sea by ship). All of these are common words and you could easily construct contexts where there is ambiguity between them.

For native words, the collisions are fewer, as you have to distinguish between genuine collisions (kami (downstep after mi) as in paper vs. as in hair) and ones where the two words are actually the same etymologically but educated writing demands using different Chinese characters, such as kara[2] = 空 (empty) / 虚 (hollow) / 殻 (husk) or kiku[0] = 聞く (hear) or 聴く (listen) or 訊く (ask). The latter is a fascinating topic in itself, connected to the same thing I hinted at above with writing in these languages also being an act of translation! (Compare to how any EN->RU translator has to decide whether any instance of blue is синий or голубой, or maybe an SE->EN translator has to think about whether a "stark sås" is spicy or just strong.)

I thought Japanese solved the issue of homophones with pitch accent

This is more of a thing with commonly used words. When you get to more technical or literary vocabulary it gets a lot harder to parse the meaning from etymology based on pronunciation alone compared to the less homophonous Greek or Latin derived technical vocabulary in English.

For literary vocabulary i could see that this might be an issue but isn't most technical vocabulary imported words from English and German?

I guess it depends on how you count (e.g. by dictionary entry vs weighted by usage frequency). Names for drugs like aspirin will be direct imports from English. Words for things like economics, maximum, limit, exchange, chemistry, heart attack, etc. will be words constructed from Chinese characters.

Why would homophones / homonyms even be a problem if / when the meaning is obvious from the context.

In Finnish I can say ”kuusi palaa” which could mean ”six pieces”, ”a fir tree is on fire”, ”your moon is on fire” or even ”piece(s) of your moon” but nobody would be confused with any real world use of that piece of sentence.

Even this infamous artificial example is obvious to any fluent speaker with some thought: ”-Kokko! Kokoo kokoon koko kokko. -Koko kokkoko? -Koko kokko, Kokko.” (-[Person named] Kokko! Assemble together the entire bonfire. -The entire bonfire? -[Yes,] the entire bonfire, Kokko)

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