Japanese's "Insufficient sound system"

[GrungyMonkey]

Since I want to support this sim, I thought I'd add some engagement by talking about one of my favorite subjects, Japanese. Given the nature of this sim, I imagine some other members might be interested as well. 

Japanese has a relatively restricted syllable system, and it's often said that this is why it has so many homophones. This is incorrect. It's definitely true that Japanese has far fewer fewer syllables than most languages. Of major world languages, Korean is the second lowest, at around 11,000 possible syllables. Japanese has around 400. For comparison, English has around 100,000. However, this doesn't really mean much. Even If Japanese only allowed 2 syllables per word, that still allows over 160,000 unique words, 4 times the typical adult vocabulary.

But Japanese does have many homophones, and there's a good reason for this: Chinese. Japanese has imported a massive number of Chinese words, especially common in philosophical, managerial or political contexts. Japanese's sound system is not well suited to mimicking Chinese, so these words got simplified. Words that are distinct in Chinese became homophones in Japanese. Part of this is the large number of Chinese sounds which become "Ch" in Japanese, another is Japanese's restricted tonal system compared to Chinese's more complex one. This is exacerbated by Japanese's strong tendency for 4 mora, 2 kanji words to have the flat tone (low-high-high-high), and exeptions are usually initial-high (high-low-low-low).

We can prove this because Japanese dictionaries keep track of whether a morpheme is of Chinese or native Japanese origin.

As an example, the infamous word "Kousei." Putting it in my dictionary finds 24 seperate words. And sure enough, 21 of those are flat, and the other 3 are initial-high. 

Every single morpheme there is Chinese.

One of those words, 高声 (LHHH), can also be read with native Japanese morphemes, as "takagoe," (LHHH or LHHL). Searching this pronunciation finds NO homophones. To reiterate: the Chinese reading of this word could have 20 other meanings, while the Japanese reading is completely unique.

There are other, rather comical examples, such as 市立 shiritsu (HLL), meaning public school, and 私立 shiritsu (HLL), meaning private school (note). Both are Chinese readings. In fact, for clarity when speaking the 市 for government is often read with the Japanese "ichi," and 私 for private as the Japanese "watakushi."

You might wonder how these words have stuck around, and the answer in the Chinese characters. I mentioned that Chinese pronunciation is common in philosophical, managerial or political contexts, and the reality is most engagement with these subjects is in text. Because of the writing system, these words are visually distinguishable, and the inconvenience in conversation is simply less of a hassle than reworking a whole chunk of the language. 

Note: technically these words aren't restricted to describing schools, and just mean public/private establishment, but they're definitely used most often to refer to schools.

Edited August 31 by GrungyMonkey

[ZachariasX]

On 9/1/2024 at 12:31 AM, GrungyMonkey said:

Given the nature of this sim, I imagine some other members might be interested as well. 

Interesting stuff, feel free to further elaborate. My literacy in Japanese doesn‘t include anything that might be useful in polite conversation. I still hope to change that.