Why is the Japanese language still using Kanji? (and a few more questions about Japanese writing)

 

Earlier today, Martin aka Gaijin Otousan asked these questions to the world:

🇯🇵👨🏽‍🚀 • Katakana – Kanji – Hiragana • Can someone please help me understand? 👨🏽‍🚀🇯🇵 pic.twitter.com/PVbT7VNXvS

— Gaijin Otousan (@Gaijinotousan) February 13, 2023

I liked these questions, and I’ll try to answer them to the best of my ability.

One small caveat: my knowledge of the Japanese language may be embarrassing after such a long time in Japan, but I believe that my knowledge ABOUT the Japanese language is not that bad, nor is my knowledge of linguistics in general (my too many years in graduate school must be useful for something, right?). So while my answers will be short on details, I think the gist can be satisfactory. You tell me.

If you find my answers too straightforward at times, remember that the questions are coming from a self-proclaimed straightforward New Yorker, and I am a self-proclaimed straightforward Frenchman. So… Well, you’ve been warned.

 

First of all, I would like to emphasize that asking “why” a language is like this or that is always a tricky question.

The truth is that most of the time there is no real “why” beyond simple force of habit. And when there are reasons, they are rarely linguistic. That’s actually one of the things I find fascinating about languages, their histories, and how they work. Most of the reasons why a language is a certain way often have to do with historical, political, or even practical reasons. They are rarely purely linguistic.

Also, very often the “best” but frustrating answer to a “why is a particular language this way?” question is… “why not?

So, with all that said, let’s start with the first question:

 

 

Why is the Japanese language still using kanji?

First of all, if you know nothing about the Japanese language, you should know that kanji are characters similar to the Chinese language. They are logograms, not phonograms. This means that a character has one meaning (sometimes more) and no unique pronunciation. On the other hand, the Roman alphabet, aka the letters you know and that I’m using to type this text, are phonograms, each letter carries a sound but has no meaning. The meaning comes from putting the letters together to form words.

 

To answer the question, I think the trick here is the “still” part.

As Westerners, we are used to a much simpler writing system, and we can’t help but find kanji overly complicated and somewhat outdated. But what about from the Japanese perspective? Is the system really complicated and outdated? Sure, learning most kanji takes years of memorization and practice, but when it comes to your native language, is it so different from learning spelling, grammar rules, and the like? It’s true that native English speakers have it easy compared to many other common languages. English spelling is relatively easy. Its grammar is so simple that it’s possible to learn English without consciously learning grammar. In fact, I believe that few native English speakers ever learn the grammar of their native language. Personally, I’ve always been amazed by this fact. To give you a point of comparison, if you take my own native language, which is not that different from English, I’m not sure you can call yourself fluent in French if you don’t know the grammar backwards and forwards. But English also has its complications. Its lexicon is probably the largest in the world, with so many synonyms. It takes years to learn enough vocabulary, probably even for native speakers. Is there any living person who can claim to know the entire English lexicon? I doubt it. I could be wrong, but I’m tempted to say that there are more than a few Japanese people who know all the kanji. Most Japanese people certainly know most kanji. Do most English speakers know most English words?

 

My point here is that all languages have their overly complicated parts. Native speakers take them for granted, while learners of the language often get gray hairs studying them.

So is the kanji system complicated? Yes, it is. Is it too complicated? Probably not, or I’m pretty sure the Japanese would have stopped using it eventually, or at least simplified it. In fact, there was a time in Japanese history when kanji were considered overly complicated and inconvenient. It was shortly after they were introduced to Japan! The kanji system was great and all (Japanese wasn’t a written language before kanji were introduced in the 4th or 5th century) except for one thing: kanji didn’t work to transcribe some parts of the language (mostly its purely grammatical parts). And that’s why kana (hiragana and katakana) were invented. If you don’t know Japanese, hiragana and katakana are two sets of “alphabets” (not exactly alphabets, as they are syllabaries) that are phonograms and are used for all sorts of things (more on some of those things later in this text), including parts of the written language that are purely grammatical and for which kanji is not the best tool.

For centuries, the kanji + kana system has worked well, and there has been no reason to change it. The only reason is recent and is… foreigners… During the Meiji era, when Japan was modernizing and opening up to the world, there was actually talk of abandoning the Kanji + Kana writing system and replacing it with the Roman alphabet. I guess those talks met with enough resistance that the change never happened. Force of habit, perhaps? There are probably other reasons that I have forgotten, they must be out there on the web.

Also, I could be wrong, but I can’t help but compare the situation to Vietnam.
Vietnam used to have kanji (well, sinograms), and unlike Japan, the system was eventually abandoned for the Roman alphabet. However, there are two major differences with Japan.
First, while the Romanization of the Vietnamese language was invented by Portuguese missionaries in the 17th century, it wasn’t really adopted for widespread use until the French colonization of the country in the 19th century (around the same time as the Meiji era). The thing is, once the country became a colony, it didn’t have much choice in the matter. There were also a few other factors that made it easier to impose the system. Although they’d been in Vietnam for centuries, sinograms were never really perceived as part of the Vietnamese language (unlike kanji, which are fully integrated into the Japanese language). Mainly because most of the Vietnamese population was illiterate, and sinograms were only used by the elite (not too unlike Latin in Europe some time ago). The use of the Roman alphabet helped educate and literate the Vietnamese population. There are many factors at play, but I don’t think the country could have gone from a 10% literacy rate to a 98% literacy rate in less than a century if it had stuck to using only sinograms. I could be wrong, and my only source for this is a few Vietnamese I have talked to. So take it with a grain of salt.

 

Why didn’t something similar happen in Japan at the same time? Well, Japan in the second half of the 19th century was a very different country from Vietnam. First of all, it was never colonized. The West had no power to force Japan to change its writing system. Let’s not forget that almost all non-European countries that use the Roman alphabet in their language do so because they were colonies of a Western European nation at some point in their history. Well, even many of the European countries that use it do so because they were colonized by Rome. Japan was never forced to use the Roman alphabet, so they just never did. And while Emperor Meiji seriously Westernized Japan, he didn’t see the need to Westernize the writing system.

Why not? I’m not sure, but it should be noted that Japan was already one of the most literate countries in the world (probably and ironically thanks to its dual writing system, both phonetic and logographic). In the mid-19th century, the literacy rate was higher than in most European countries. So changing the writing system wouldn’t have made a difference in terms of literacy, and it was probably considered pointless. For all I know, the Japanese may have seen (and may still see?) their writing system as more convenient and more advanced than a simple phonological alphabet.

The only thing that resembles a colonization of Japan is the occupation by US forces after WWII, but that was not true colonization, and the US had limited power (and intent) in what it could change, if anything. Not to mention the lack of settlers. Still, this is the time when most road signs and many official signs became bilingual in Japanese & English. If you think about it, there aren’t many countries that have bilingual road signs where one of the languages is foreign to the country and its people.

So basically, the kanji system has never been abandoned (and is unlikely to be abandoned in the foreseeable future) because the Japanese have no reason to do so. It’s an inconvenient system for foreigners, but not for Japanese speakers. And so be it if foreigners struggle with it. In fact, it’s possible that the postwar creation of bilingual signs has reinforced the idea that Japan should use more scripts to make itself more accessible, not fewer.

 

So “why bother with kanji?”

Well, we – foreigners – “bother” with kanji, and they bother us, but they don’t bother native Japanese speakers. It’s not bothersome to them. It’s just “the way it is.” My kids actually kind of enjoy their kanji homework. I can definitely see how it can be something enjoyable to learn under certain circumstances – including “being a kid”.

I’ll end this part with that. We subconsciously see our respective native languages as “normal”, and we tend to see any other language that deviates too much from that “norm” as weird and unfathomable (yes, after more than a decade in Japan, while kanji are no longer weird, they remain mostly unfathomable to me), but that’s all arbitrary and subjective.

Again, to look at the issue from a different perspective, one could ask why the English language insists on using the Roman alphabet when it’s clearly not that appropriate to transcribe the language. For example, the “th” sound clearly needs its own character, and every vowel in English has two or three different pronunciations. In some ways, the Old English writing system was much better for the language, even in its modern form (there was even a letter for ‘th’ back then: ‘þ’). And yet English is written in the Roman alphabet, not for linguistic or phonetic reasons, but for historical ones: the Roman Empire first, and the dominance of Latin as the language of education, religion, and more for centuries and centuries (that dominance is still there if you pay attention, just look at scientific terms in biology and such). Then the dominance of French among the English elite for most of the Middle Ages sealed the deal and ensured that the language would be written that way and not another for centuries to come.

 

 

Why do Japanese people use both katakana and hiragana? Having two phonetic scripts is pretty redundant, isn’t it?

Again, this isn’t about logic, although there is some logic to writing Japanese words one way and foreign words the other. For people who don’t know Japanese, katakana is the script usually used to write foreign words in Japanese. However, you will sometimes see katakana used in many other ways. Sometimes it’s for aesthetic value, sometimes for practical reasons.

And again, I’m going to draw a parallel with the Roman alphabet. Why do we have uppercase and lowercase letters? It seems obvious to us, we never ask ourselves why, but believe me, I often see a “WTF” on my students’ faces when I count them wrong for misusing capitalization in their essays.

The fact is, there’s no logical reason to use uppercase or lowercase these days, but we do it anyway because it’s what we do. It’s not bothersome, and sometimes it can even be convenient. And even more simply, it’s the way the rules of writing have crystallized over time.

However, there were good reasons for their creation in the past. During the Roman Empire, the Latin language had only capital letters. At that time, most writing was done by engraving (in stone or on clay tablets), and straight lines were simply easier to engrave. That’s how the Latin language developed a script that consisted mostly of straight lines (today’s capital letters). A few centuries later, during the Middle Ages, most writing was done with ink applied to parchment with quills. With ink, curved lines were easier to form, and gradually (between the 5th and 8th centuries) the minuscule letters (renamed lowercase when printing became a thing) were born. They were also smaller for very practical reasons; you could fit more text on a page. Parchment wasn’t cheap. Yes, lowercase letters are smaller than uppercase letters for financial reasons. We’re a long way from pure linguistics here, and yet.
Later, we started mixing the two for reasons I may or may not get into another day.

Back to the Japanese language. Just as both uppercase and lowercase remained in Western European languages, both hiragana and katakana had their uses and functions, so both remained.

I think it’s as simple as that.

 

 

Why aren’t there any spaces to separate words in Japanese?

Again, I’ll answer the question by asking a mirror question. Why do we use spaces in the Roman alphabet? The answer seems obvious. Because it’s easier to read with spaces. It seems obvious today, but it wasn’t always so.

Originally, there were no spaces in the Latin language. The idea of putting spaces between words was invented around the 7th or 8th century, and it took a few more centuries to spread throughout Europe. It became more common in some languages and less common in others. For example, even today, German uses spaces much less than French or English. Remember the infamous very long compound nouns in German? They’re basically just a bunch of words lumped together with no spaces to separate them.
Also note that German uses capital letters much more than other Western European languages. I don’t know much about German, but I’d be tempted to say that the two things are related, and that legibility is probably the reason.

Back to the Japanese language. I think the reason it doesn’t use spaces (aside from the fact that spaces are a European invention) is that it doesn’t need them. The mixture of kanji and kana, coupled with the fact that kanji themselves are logographic (they transcribe meanings, not sounds), makes the use of spaces unnecessary.
In a sense, all the suffixes added to many Japanese words serve the same function as spaces. When you see a -は, -を, -の, -で, and so on, you know that what follows is another idea, another “word.” It’s actually a little bit the same in Latin. Spaces were not necessary to understand a text because the end of words was obvious thanks to declensions and conjugations.
You probably know the phrase “E pluribus unum”. Well, I’m not sure if it existed in the Roman Empire, but if it did, it probably would have been written as EPLVRIBVSVNVM. And a Roman would have no problem reading it. They would have understood that “E” is its own thing (“from”), and then the ending “-VS” makes it obvious that what follows “VNVM” is another word. The same goes for ‘-VM’, by the way. (and I didn’t replace the ‘U’ with ‘V’ to make things more complicated, it’s just that the letter ‘U’ didn’t exist during the Roman Empire, ‘V’ was used for both, ‘u’ was invented along with lowercase, but that’s for another day) Things became less and less obvious as declensions disappeared as the Latin language evolved into something else (all the different Romance languages). This is when spaces became necessary and were invented. Spaces also became necessary when the act of reading became a more silent activity than it had been before. Again, this helped with legibility.

So the Japanese language, because of its structure and its writing system, doesn’t need spaces to be readable.

Basically.

 

I don’t know if these answers are satisfactory. Probably not, but usually the reason we ask these questions comes from our perspective on the language rather than from the language itself. Languages always evolve in more or less chaotic ways, and there’s rarely a linguistic reason for what they do or don’t do.

The thing is, most of the time we could ask ourselves the same questions about our respective native languages, but we rarely do because of the familiarity we have with them.
It’s also why native speakers of a language we’re studying often don’t have the answers to these questions when we ask them. They have simply never asked themselves these questions. They simply take their language for granted, just as we take ours for granted.

 

I’ll close with a brief personal note. While I’m not really a linguist, I could have been, and I studied linguistics quite a bit during the (too?) many years I spent in college. My favorite part of studying linguistics was studying the history of languages. It’s an amazing thing to learn the “whys” and “hows” of languages, and I really think it should be taught more to the general population. First, the history of our own native language, but also the history of the languages we learn. And if you get the chance, I really recommend that you learn about them. By the way, I’m reading the book “The History of the English Language” right now. It’s fascinating.

I guess that’s all for now.

Stay tuned for more…

 

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