Date: Fri, 30 Oct 92 11:36:58 MST
Newsgroups: sci.lang.japan
Subject: Re: In defense of kanji in Japanese
Organization: Brigham Young University, Provo UT USA
From: luke@newt.ee.byu.edu (David Luke)

In article <1992Oct30.133924.1808@wam.umd.edu> rsrodger@wam.umd.edu (Robert Stephen Rodgers) writes:
>In article <1cqqckINN1hd@agate.berkeley.edu> ucbked@athena (Earl H. Kinmonth) writes:
>>maybe you never read for meaning, but some of us do.  i regularly
>>"read" japanese texts where i cannot remember the pronunciations
>>of all of the characters, but i can still get the ideas, which is
>>what i want.

>	This is not reading for meaning--and, in any case, it's not really
>	reading at all, but rather "decoding".  Japanese natives read
>	for _sound_, this has been shown in a number of scientific 
>	studies.

He's reading the text to extract the meaning.  If this isn't "reading for
meaning", maybe you'd like to provide a definition.

>	Ok, I overstated it.  But the fact remains: Japans vaunted 99% 
>	literacy is a sham.

Maybe 99% is, but I've never met an illiterate Japanese.  I do have one
friend that has a hard time reading.  He dropped out of school after
junior high.

>>kanji have not been used to write the sounds of the japanese
>>language since the nara period.  kana and romaji are used for
>>that!
>
>	On the contrary, the kanji are now, and have _always_ been 
>	used to write the sounds in a language.  Why do you suppose
>	that you use one kanji over another in a given word even 
>	those there are others with the same "meaning"?  
>
>	"Because that's how it's written"?  
>
>	BZZZZzzzT!  Not good enough.  It's written that way because
>	the characters in question have the reading needed.

Oh, so that's why "ashita", "asu", and "myounichi" are written three
different ways, because they're read differently.  That's why "hanasu"
uses that character -- they picked one that had the Chinese readings
"hana" and "hanashi", and it just so happened to also have the meaning
"to speak".  Amazing coincidence there.  It's interesting that the
Chinese somehow lost those inherent readings, isn't it.

>	In a way, you're right.  Kanji have not been used 
>	_randomly_ _just_ for sound since Manyoogana, but this
>	does not effectively counter the fact that the kanji
>	became a standardized system.  The fact that you 
>	can't take the compound "Benzyo" and read it as
>	"toire" pretty much eliminates the meaning bit.  If you
>	do so, you are not reading the word in question.

No, it doesn't eliminate the "meaning bit".  Now, if you could write a word
like "koukou" with the characters for "high" and "school" and have it mean
"filial piety" or "the mouth" or "navigation" or "bright" or "like this"
or "high school" (all with the same characters, mind you), you could claim
that the characters contained nothing but phonetic information.  In fact,
if you really believe that the characters have no meaning, I suggest that
you show your faith in your argument and start writing like this.  Maybe
then you could succeed in making the "illiterate" class, even by Japanese
rating systems...

>	:-)  And notice how all of those icons need labels or they are
>	useless and confusing.. 

Icons are meaninless ==> unlabled icons are useless and confusing.
Unlabeled icons are confusing =/=> icons are meaningless.

There's a big difference between "if" and "iff".

-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|  David Luke                      "There's nothing worse than a brilliant     |
|  luke@wombat.ee.byu.edu           image of a fuzzy concept."                 |
|                                                               -- Ansel Adams |