this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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Excellent time for Japanese devs to collectively develop some open-source fonts. Many hands make light work.
Don't they already exist? Work already done makes no work needed.
Evidently game devs have some distinct expectations, or they could already use those and save some money.
This could be a rallying point for professional artists to build a font family conveying whimsy, authority, fantasy, antiquity, futurism, etc. Like how DejaVu covers a little bit of everything.
I don't mean to agree with that other person hating on kanji, but if they're going to take on the task of making a new font they could potentially alter the writing system somewhat to simplify some things and/or extend versatility of some characters. A new evolution would be exciting.
鬱 has 29 strokes. People just write うつbecause they can understandably not be assed to write all that. So why not, if you have to go through the task of making an entire font, replace it with something people might actually write? You could come up with a new character in the tradition of hiragana's origins, something uniquely Japanese.
Excellent time for the Japanese to drop ideogram/logogram system and have an alphabet like a functional language.
edit: Yes, I'm poking fun at the Japanese for using logograms. If your take from this is that I'm saying the Japanese are bad and not that logograms are bad, ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
I was actually going to call it a removed writing, referencing how imperial units are known through non-Americans on the internet, but I already knew the word would be censored (yep, I didn't write "removed", lemmy did). In hindsight "functional" wasn't the best pick, not because it's "offensive" or whatever you may think, but because it's not poking enough fun at it... if I said "like a normal language" instead, would you be more outraged by the joke? It seems like a better pick for the future, so let me know - I'm sure I'm going to have more opportunities to poke fun at logograms, and also sure I'll find more people addicted to being outraged trying to make it about race. So get here your quick fix, I'm basically Hitler.
Why? And what constitutes a "functional language" to you?
Is the fact that they can read, write, speak, and understand the language not "functional" enough for you? The point gets across to the person receiving the message.
You can even translate it to a "functional language" of your choice, with some restrictions. Translation restrictions aren't isolated to Japanese either, there's lots of languages that have things which don't translate well, or at all, to English.
... they already have two syllabaries. They're not about to upend their whole writing system just to maintain foreign intellectual property.
that's literally one of the most bigoted comments I've ever seen in the fediverse
your comment is in English, a language so non-functional it's the only one that had to have spelling bees to get kids to learn its asinine rules
Uhh... Basically every language I can think of have had some form of childhood activity that pushed learning it's asinine rules at some point in it's history.
Cause fun fact.
Literally every language that has ever existed is batshit crazy, makes no sense and might as well be unhinged nonsense.
That's not a monopoly English has. Not by a fucking long shot.
That guy's comment is racist as fuck tho
The more i look into different languages, the more i feel different languages are just as complex as each other, with complexity put in different places
Chances are high they hate it because they had to learn kanji in school or for work.
I also think it's an excellent time for Americans to drop imperial units and use metrics like a functional measurement system - is this also racist?
No, that's a whole new unrelated topic. Any other questions?
I think ideograms suck because they are an extremely bad writing system, and imperial units suck because they are an extremely bad measurement system... why is one racist and the other is not?
If someone around was still using roman numerals I'd also say it's an excellent time to drop that system, but fortunately everyone already did.
edit: Bonus question: If I say it's an excellent time to drop the Gregorian calendar do I win at racism for expanding it to the whole world?
The Chinese use ideograms so booo, but their local mix of lunar and solar calendar is great.
That's nice, but what you originally said was that "the Japanese don't have a functional writing system", which is bigoted, because it constitutes an unreasonable belief/prejudice against a particular group of people ("the Japanese"). It's an unreasonable position because the Japanese writing system is obviously functional, as millions of people use it to great effect every day.
This is not bigotry because it isn't an unreasonable belief, and it doesn't target/prejudice against one specific group (other than 'imperial measurement users', which isn't really an identifying or culturally significant group).
Bonus answer: no, bigotry targets/prejudices against a specific identifying group. "The whole world" doesn't qualify as a group that you can be bigoted against. Hating everyone makes you a grumpy curmudgeon, but not a racist.
Hope this helps.
Do you make it a habit to misquote people on purpose? My post is right there, if you want to use quotation marks to say I said something, at least write what I actually wrote instead of making something up, that's very dishonest.
I'm very specifically saying ideograms/logograms aren't a "functional" writing system (yeah, they are technically "functional" - as imperial units, they are just very bad). Ideograms/logograms aren't exclusive to the Japanese - and neither do the Japanese use only that system (so your fabricated quote is non sequitur). The mention of Japanese is a context parody of the comment I replied to, had the guy said "Excellent time for Chinese..." then my sentence would say Chinese instead of Japanese. I'm roasting a writing system and you all trying to make it about race... quite sad and pathetic excuse to be outraged.
ps: "Imperial measurement users" are an "identifying or culturally significant group", they are called Americans - technically, Liberia and Myanmar also primarily use imperial units, but they are not a culturally significant group over the internet. So if you are talking about "imperial measurement users", you are talking about Americans.
I'm not being dishonest, I paraphrased.
Your original comment (included above for convenience) very clearly implies that Japanese is not a functional language because it doesn't use an alphabet. I didn't misrepresent you at all.
First, plenty of other places other than America, Liberia, and Myanmar use imperial units. And even if they didn't, the inclusion of Liberia and Myanmar means "imperial system users" isn't just identifying Americans, so you're just flat out incorrect about that. I'm ignoring the bit where you said "[Liberia and Myanmar] are not culturally significant groups over the internet" because that implies that you think bigotry only exists on the Internet, or maybe you think you can only be bigoted against a group with a large enough Internet presence or something? Which I know you can't possibly think, so I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt there and chalking that up to a miscommunication.
Second, bigotry necessarily involves holding an unreasonable position or belief. The belief that the imperial system is worse than metric is not unreasonable, because there's evidence supporting that belief, and there's even a large number of imperial system users that hold that belief. The belief that it's "time for the Japanese to drop ideogram/logogram system and have an alphabet like a functional language" is unreasonable for the reasons I explained previously.
Third, it doesn't matter what ethnicity or nationality you used, the structure of your statement would still be bigoted, because it would still be an unreasonable belief that prejudices against a particular group of people.
Hope this helps.
"The belief that the imperial system is worse than metric is not unreasonable"
Is the belief that the logographic system is worse than alphabets (and abugidas, for that matter) unreasonable? You seem to suggest that, arbitrarily, for this case it's not just unreasonable, but also bigotry...
"It's time for the Japanese to drop their system" - racism.
"It's time for the Americans to drop their system" - not racism.
Ok, whatever makes you feel better about yourself. I will still say logograms and imperial units are awful.
Lol yes. Both systems have benefits and drawbacks, it's unreasonable to say either is "worse" than the other. It's certainly not as clear-cut as the comparison between the imperial and metric systems.
In alphabets you learn a small set of letters. Using those letters you can logically form syllables. With those syllables you can write and read every single word in that language (yeah, through historical processes most languages fucked up the connection between syllables and phonemes, but that's a different matter).
Meanwhile logographic systems have no logical way to form words (unless they are compound), as lots of words are their own symbol. In current logogram languages you are expected to learn from 2000 to 4000 different characters (compared to an average of 20-something letters in alphabets) just to read most publications - and odds are that if you try to read something from an area you have no expertise in, you are going to stumble upon several words you can't even read (difference between ability to read and knowing the meaning. One may stumble upon a word they don't know the meaning of while using an alphabet, but they can still read the word. While if you don't know the right logogram for a word, even if you know the meaning of it, you can neither write nor read it).
I find the distinction even more clear-cut than imperial vs metrics, as imperial just uses very confusing conversions. Logograms are way more unnecessarily complicated.
Agree you've covered some of the pros of alphabet systems and cons of logographic systems, and those are totally valid. You're neglecting the other sides though, so let's balance that out:
Here's some pros of logographic systems:
Higher information density - you can say more with less, and readers can parse it faster
Compound words are intuitive - just put the symbols for the two halves of the words next to each other (or visually combine them in some cases)
Symbols have direct meaning - there is usually no "sounding out" words to figure out what they mean, the symbol by itself fully encapsulates meaning, independent of pronunciation
Because meaning is independent from phonetics, ambiguity is reduced with homophones, in that two words that sound the same still have two different-looking symbols
Written communication can still be understood even across different dialects, and even across different languages altogether, if the same logographic system is used, and even if those logographic symbols have different pronunciations. This separation makes it possible to communicate across language barriers without having to learn a whole other language.
Logographic systems don't have to adapt to changes in pronunciation over time, they're stable
Here's some cons of alphabet systems:
Much lower information density takes longer to read, most people have to internally convert the visual data to sound to understand it, so it physically takes more brainpower/effort to understand written text
Wild inconsistencies in phonetics within a language, requiring rote memorization of spelling "rules" and all of their various exceptions. Makes learning new words difficult as you can't be sure if you're "sounding it out" correctly unless you've heard the spoken word
Meaning directly depends on phonetics/pronunciation, which can lead to confusion and ambiguity with alternate pronunciations, alternate spellings, and differing dialects (e.g. Canadian French vs. Metropolitan French)
Learning a language that uses an alphabet system means learning it twice - the written language and the spoken language
Homophones and hereronyms? Good luck
Also here's some food for thought. I 100% guarantee you use a logographic system every single day, very easily, without even realizing it. In fact, nearly the whole world uses it - Arabic numerals.
I don't know about a lot of those points. I can read French quite well, but can't speak it for shit, I don't know how much I have to "convert" in my head since its phonetics are irrelevant to me (and as English became a main online language, tons of people everywhere in the world can read and write it, but not really speak it since we are all communicating primarily through text - my English pronunciation sucks btw)... but anyway, about stability and adaptation, China has 120k+ different characters in its language, the vast majority got out of use because other ways to write the same thing became more popular, so I don't think it works like you described.
Have you ever heard about Paulo Freire? The guy developed a very interesting literacy method, he tested it out with adult rural workers from poor regions and in just 2 months he was able to get those people to read and write (even if with grammatical mistakes) because his method is phonetic (well, there's quite more to it, but the reading/writing part is phonetic). For learning to read/write other languages, the "no sounding out" might be an advantage (like a lot of netizens writing in English without really speaking it), but for your own language, well, from what I understand they expect that only by high school the kids in Japan and China should be able to read their local newspaper because of the amount of characters they need to know for it, meanwhile Paulo Freire got adults, who have very low mental plasticity, able to do it in 2 months... phonetics and alphabets ftw :P
edit: We both know we are talking about Chinese and Japanese when talking about logograms, so great for them they have the same root and symbols have the same meaning even when sounding different. If there were other languages using logograms but with different roots, the positive point of symbols having the same meaning wouldn't hold. But something happened with the Koreans that made them break away and build from scratch what seems to be the best and most logical writing system around.
Sure, I agree that alphabet systems are initially easier to learn than logographic systems. But to achieve that they sacrifice the consistency and lack of ambiguity of a logographic system. It's funny you bring up Korean as an example of a good alphabet system, because I can assure you as someone who is currently learning Korean, it has it's weird spelling inconsistencies and pronunciation "rules" and exceptions, just like any other alphabet system.
And again, I'm not trying to convince you that one is better than the other. My whole point is that one isn't any better or worse than another. They each have their own strengths, weaknesses, and specific purposes, they're both functional, one isn't better or worse than the other as a whole.
A take I had from this is that a non-phonetic written language works like cached memory (and you might have a lot to cache), while phonetic is like real-time rendering. I was reading about how Vietnam changed to its current script, and just like Korea, and also Paulo Freire's view of language, seems like the change made the language more accessible.
You're absolutely correct that Korea (and Vietnam I suppose, I don't know much about their language) invented their alphabet to make literacy more accessible, and I think that's awesome and a really good feature of alphabet systems. I can even see why that would make people prefer alphabet systems, since accessibility is super important when you're first learning a language.
I think your cached vs. real-time analogy is spot on. And while you can definitely come up with scenarios where caching is better than real-time rendering, and other scenarios where real-time rendering is better than caching, it'd be difficult to argue that one is unequivocally better or worse than the other.
And I think you suck because you are an extremely bad person.
Equivalent statement right?
Oh no, now you are being bigot towards *whatever ethnicity I belong*
- if I was to use the logic going on here.
I did not mention an ethnicity. I mentioned you, specifically.
I mentioned logograms specfically, but this made me racist toward Japanese people. So hey, congratulation, you now hate latinos.
"All I said is that the Japanese do not have a functional language. I don't understand where people think I was being derogatory about a specific race."
"... have an alphabet like a functional race." no, wait, I actually said "... have an alphabet like a functional language."
Making fun of the writing system of a language = making fun a race (which isn't even the people who created that writing system...). Yeah, I'm basically Hitler.
Like, haskell? But why?!