Japanese is written even more heavily with Kanji
- Thread starter Vingilótë
- Start date
Particles, I suppose so--I mean, you could write the hiragana "no" as "teki". There are also a lot of words that are commonly written in hiragana, for whatever reason, that do have kanji versions. It should be possible to create a cultural shift towards using those. Of course, I think in the modern period you will always have at least kana used for modifying verbs and for foreign/loan words. You can't have modern Japanese written solely in kanji. I don't forsee any insurmountable difficulties in using kanji a lot more, though, should you want to for some reason.
You could always just not invent kana...
On another note, it's a lot easier to imagine a modern Japanese in which kanji are LESS widespread. There were more than a few movements that tried to steer the language away from kanji and towards katakana or romaji during the Meiji and Taishô periods, what with westernization and all. The list of jôyô kanji for everyday use is taken from about this time; it was meant to restrict and regulate the use of kanji and to cut out a bunch of more obscure ones. This movement redoubled in the westernization wave post-WWII. And we've still got pro-kana only groups and pro-romaji only groups today.
Here's the relevant Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_script_reform
But if we've got movements like this, it's pretty easy to imagine them backwards. Starting about the time of the Meiji Era (before then Japan's a bit too decentralized), it would be possible to have some ideology-rooted movement AWAY from kana towards kanji. It doesn't necessarily have to be nationalist; it could be anti-modernization or anti-centralization - endorsing tradition over government policy.
On a smaller scale, I could also see a non-ideological follow-the-leader literary trend in the wake of a popular author who uses lots of kanji in their personal writing style. Some subcultures also gratuitously use complex kanji where most people use kana because it's just cool.
On another note, it's a lot easier to imagine a modern Japanese in which kanji are LESS widespread. There were more than a few movements that tried to steer the language away from kanji and towards katakana or romaji during the Meiji and Taishô periods, what with westernization and all. The list of jôyô kanji for everyday use is taken from about this time; it was meant to restrict and regulate the use of kanji and to cut out a bunch of more obscure ones. This movement redoubled in the westernization wave post-WWII. And we've still got pro-kana only groups and pro-romaji only groups today.
Here's the relevant Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_script_reform
But if we've got movements like this, it's pretty easy to imagine them backwards. Starting about the time of the Meiji Era (before then Japan's a bit too decentralized), it would be possible to have some ideology-rooted movement AWAY from kana towards kanji. It doesn't necessarily have to be nationalist; it could be anti-modernization or anti-centralization - endorsing tradition over government policy.
On a smaller scale, I could also see a non-ideological follow-the-leader literary trend in the wake of a popular author who uses lots of kanji in their personal writing style. Some subcultures also gratuitously use complex kanji where most people use kana because it's just cool.
As mcdo was saying, there are a lot of modern Japanese verbs and participles that are written with hiragana now instead of kanji (できる vs. 出来る, for example), but I'm pretty sure the transition was made because a lot of these verbs are used in an auxiliary position to modify other verbs. Although since Japanese was originally written using man'yogana, a POD that retained the use thereof would probably allow loan words in the present to be written in kana, not unlike how Chinese does.
Why not just stick completely to manyogana? You'd have 出来留 instead of 出来る. It's still kana but one that completely incorporates Chinese characters.
My point exactly. Though you'd need to standardize which man'yogana are used - 流 and 類 could both also substitute for る. :3
I think in an alternatehistory /p/(P) ,/tS/(Ch), /S/(Sh), /dZ/(J) should have their own Manyogana as well, they are considered allophones and borrowed phonemes in Japanese since it normally appears in Sino-Japanese Words,Foreign words and Contraction Slangs(Shichau, Ja, Che) and sometimes appears in complementary distribution in Japanese.
Out of curiousity, if you use that for "dekiru", what would you use for "dekimasu", "dekimashita", etc?
A little bit of Internet research suggests that it would be ... 出来末寸 for dekimasu and 出来末之太 for dekimashita.
Basically in my example, you'd just be using the origins of hiragana: ま is derived from 末, す from 寸, し from 之, た from 太.
It looks a bit unwieldy so I don't know if there's a good reason to get rid of hiragana and katakana and stick to manyogana.