this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2023
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The emphasis on Kanji composition is hilarious to me since that's Chinese and in Chinese it's got all the dials turned to 11.
I agree. Also as someone who knows Japanese to some extent, the real 肉 and 骨 is memorizing all the exceptions where the neat kanji rules don’t work, like when the pronunciation doesn’t match the look of the kanji.
As the old idiom goes: the devil is in the details. And there's a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooot of devilry in 汉字.
Oo, oo, meat and potatoes?
Chinese doesn't have a phonetic alphabet, so basically all the writing is in hanzi. Japanese kanji were basically just taken from hanzi, but they also have a phonetic alphabet, so they don't need all the words to have a kanji equivalent.
Also, there's much less overlap in pronunciation of Japanese words than in Chinese. It makes sense that you would have more characters to represent more words when their pronunciation is identical.
That wasn't my point.
My point was he was waxing rhapsodic about how cunning it was that the Japanese combined Kanji when they basically just used (a subset of) Chinese writing where that combined Hanzi has been a feature for literally thousands of years (in various forms).