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A giant step backward — about a thousand years.  Writing regression.

“'Pseudo-Chinese': New Japanese Social Media App Only Allows Kanji", Jay Allen, Unseen Japan (12/18/24)

Whatever possessed some folks to do this?

Wanna stress-test your Japanese knowledge? A new social media app for Japanese users dares you to ditch kana by allowing only kanji input, a.k.a. "Pseudo-Chinese."

Or is that stress-testing your Chinese knowledge?  What kind of language results?  Natural, normal, native Japanese?  Or some kind of hentai Nihongo kaibutsu 変態日本語怪物 ("abnormal Japanese language monstrosity")?

Written Japanese consists of three components: kanji, Chinese-derived ideographs, plus the two kana syllabaries, hiragana and katakana. Hiragana generally represents grammatical elements and certain common words, while katakana is used for loan words, onomatopoeia, and emphasis.

There have been attempts to change this beautiful but admittedly complex system over the years. All of them have failed. One group that wanted Japanese to shift into using romaji (Latin characters) admitted defeat last year.

The Rômazi Sekai (World of Romanization) may have thrown in the towel and disbanded, but I think they gave up too soon.  The trend of history is for people in the aggregate to use fewer and fewer kanji in comparison with kana and fewer and fewer kana in comparison with letters of the alphabet.  Just you wait and watch.

Tsuita operates as an anonymous message board. There’s no user sign-in – you can start posting to it immediately. You just can’t include kana – attempting to will produce an error message that prevents you from posting. (The error message, of course, is entirely in kanji- 偽中国語入力必須; nise-chuugokugo nyuuryoku hissu, input in Pseudo-Chinese required.)

The garbage in is Pseudo-Chinese, and the garbage out is Pseudo-Japanese.

Selected readings

• "Kana, not kanji, for names" (1/3/21)
• "More katakana, fewer kanji" (4/4/16)
• "Pseudo-Chinese conversation of a Japanese couple" (7/20/23)
• "Battle for Taiwanese" (1/24/23)
• "Massive borrowing" (2/18/19)

[Thanks to Christian Horn]

December 28, 2024 @ 5:07 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and social media, Writing systems

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