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Katakana, Hiragana, and "English"

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2016 5:12 pm
by Tetsuwan Penguin
I was reading the lengthy list of comments that were posted to a video on youtube by a linguist who was describing how Japanese is the most difficult written language to master. Among his points, and in the comments were how crazy it was that Japanese has TWO phonetic scripts with EXACTLY the same pronunciations. A comment was made how that made no sense at all to English speakers.

Well, the point was also made in one of the comments, that our language has EXACTLY the same situation, we have two scripts that we English speakers use to write with that duplicate each other. They are, of course, Capital and Lower Case! (I never thought of that!). Of course, these two scripts resemble each other much more than Hiragana and Katakana do each other, but ....

Posted: Fri Dec 09, 2016 8:40 pm
by Kitty Lue
Hah, true! There's also cursive and print, with capital and lower case for each, although cursive seems to be going out of use... when learning it in 3rd grade, I was told we'd be expected to write every assignment in cursive from that point on. Now, in my senior year of highschool, I've forgotten most of the cursive alphabet because it was never enforced past 4th grade and nobody that I know writes their assignments in cursive... a little sad, but I guess having both cursive and print scripts is a bit redundant. I do write in a bit of a mix of print and cursive, I guess, because connecting letters like e to the letter next to it saves time, but I think at this point I've gone way off on a tangent. :P

Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2016 2:00 pm
by Tetsuwan Penguin
There's also cursive and print, with capital and lower case for each,

Cursive is actually a typeset or font, not a totally different script. If we were to consider fonts, there are hundreds of them! (Just look at the drop down list in any word processor program!). For that matter, Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji are drawn in different typesets or fonts depending on if they are drawn by a brush, nib pen, pencil, or a typeset (there ARE typewriters for Japanese characters). Then don't forget the typesets used to print shinbun, and hon, as well as different fonts used on computer screens and printers! (BTW the Kanji for 'book' looks a lot like the kanji for tree). If you've ever seen some of the original Astroboy Manga in Japanese, you might have noticed the different 'typesets' used on the cover of the manga, and in the comic itself (where it was hand drawn by the artist).

Posted: Sat Dec 17, 2016 6:24 pm
by Kitty Lue
Ah, I guess I thought of cursive as a script rather than a font because some letters have a totally different shape, but, come to think of it, cursive isn't really used with print like capitals are used with lower case letters.
Haha, fonts, another way that we make written language more complicated. XD