Re: tlug: kanji or romaji for Japanese? (was: parallel-port IDE)

[Scott Stone <sstone@example.com>]

On Mon, 19 Oct 1998, John De Hoog wrote:

> No, it was not studying kanji that made the difference. The difference
> was that the students who studied in kanji had a deeper understanding of
> what they were studying than those who studied the same material in
> romaji. This is the whole point of the necessity of kanji. Japanese is
> limited phonetically. It borrowed lots of words from Chinese, which is
> richer phonetically. To distinguish words that end up sounding the same
> in Japanese, it needs the kanji. Even over the phone, people have to
> resort to explaining which kanji they mean sometimes.

This would indicate to me that something IS wrong with the Japanese
language, if you have to explain yourself verbally via the writing system.
I definitely think that there's room for improvement in Japanese - ie,
there are things that can be fixed without doing away with the language,
or the writing system, entirely, but definitely do need to be addressed.

Everyone always says that the technology-vs-japanese issue would be
different if computers had been invented in Japan or whatever, but... how?
I was thinking about this the other night and wondering, _how_ would
computers (or, maybe now we also need to consider the phone?) be different
if they'd been invented in Japan or China?

--------------------------------------------------
Scott M. Stone <sstone@example.com, sstone@example.com>
               <sstone@example.com>
Head of TurboLinux Development/Systems Administrator
Pacific HiTech, Inc (USA) / Pacific HiTech, KK (Japan)
http://www.pht.com		http://armadillo.pht.co.jp
http://www.pht.co.jp	        http://www.turbolinux.com


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