Talk:General Discussion/@comment-25034194-20140623125703/@comment-64.233.173.205-20140624172604

^ Actually, Latin was even more confusing to read before people came up with the simple dot. Imagine trying to read an entire line of unpunctuated letters in Latin without any idea where words began and ended (try this with the unpunctuated Lorem Ipsum). That's why they came up with the simple dot in the first place. Every other alphabetical writing system invented punctuations or spaces between words as a matter of course. It's simply a natural evolution of the alphabet.

If the Japanese had adopted or developed an alphabet independently they would eventually have developed punctuations and spaces too. In fact, to some extent hiragana did. If you saw the pre-modern form of a hiragana-only letter, it would be structured in a poetic manner with columns going down containing a metered number of words (4 or 8) written side by side from right to left. This is a style copying the 8-character-per-column structure of ancient Chinese writing, from a time when books were written on bamboo strips. By writing each sentence in its own column court ladies understood perfectly that there would be 4 or 8 words per sentence in the column, making identification of meaning easier. The idea that they came up with hiragana because they were less educated is false. It took much more effort and literary sense to use traditional hiragana than it would to use kanji. You had to be more educated in literary forms than the average nobleman to use hiragana properly the way it was used back then. The real reason behind the invention of hiragana was that it was frowned upon for women to write kanji for correspondence instead of just copying them from classics as they were taught to do.

AsanasidetheenglishlanguageisironicallyeasiertoreadwithoutpunctuationsbecausethealphabeticalstructureofwrittenenglishdoesnotexactlymatchtheproperpronunciationoftheLatinletterssuchthatidentifyingwordsinajumble oflettersiseasierinenglishthaninlatin

The Chinese writing system was designed to express a tonal language where all the basic words are monosyllabic and distinguishable from each other only by the tonal changes and relation to previous and later words. It simply cannot be expressed properly without characters. The Japanese language, while having many homophones, can (for that matter, ask the English what "set" means - English has its own share of homophones). All Japanese basic words are polysyllabic in nature and easily identifiable once spaces and punctuation are added. People can actually understand Japanese sentences written in romaji perfectly well, whereas pinyin would be utter gibberish without the accompanying original characters to reference. That said, there's always the Chinese version of l33t where kids write things like wo1 ai3 ni1 (not quite sure of the numbers, feel free to correct) which reference the number of a particular character in the standard Chinese word processor list when you type the latin letters forming it. Maybe in the future this will lead to a Chinese alphabet? Who knows.