English written with Kanji ??

[jmignot]

I hope my question won't sound too crazy.

According to what I know of the Chinese and Japanese languages (not too much, actually!), it seems to me that the transcription of Japanese using kanji is the result of a fortuitous historical situation, not because those two languages are by any means close to each other (apart, of course, from the considerable number of Chinese words borrowed into Japanese -- but this is not my point here).

So I wondered whether anybody ever tried how a western language might be amenable to a transcription using kanji. After all, the Japanese were obliged to work out a rather weird combination of kanji and kana to cope with the different syntax of their language.

Indeed, English does possess some kind of "kanji" : numbers, mathematical symbols, etc. Just consider examples like :

>0 for positive
2 (two), 2nd (second), which could easily be extended to include 2ble (double), 2atomic (diatomic), or even 2sexual. Here, we have got multiple readings, just like kanji!
And why not also okurigana:
xed (multiplied), xing (multiplying) xcation, etc.

As I write these examples, it comes to my mind that flexion in English verbs is going to be a most serious difficulty. But this perhaps would no be enough to discourage an imaginative scholar…

I do not mean that here would be of any practical interest in that. Just for the sake of contemplating how a language relates to one particular writing system.

Any ideas?

[Bueller_007]

I suppose if you wanted to, you could think of each individual English word as being a pictograph. Not all kanji are pure ideographs, and in fact most are composed of a radical that gives some very rudimentary meaning, and a component added to give the kanji its sound. So if you wanted, I guess you could think of the Latin/Greek/whatever roots of the English word as being the radical, and the actual spelling as being the part of the pictograph that gives the word its sound.

[Lambrix]

I'm not sure this is related to what you're trying to say, but I recall this story from an older friend of mine hearing from people in the army. Mind you this is only the story I heard, but there was at one time a westerner in China who during the course of his business there acquired a secretary that was Chinese, but had learned whichever European language that the man spoke. She was to do dictation for meetings, but instead of writing in shorthand, she wrote the whole conversation with characters and was able to accurately read back the whole meeting. What's more, she was able to do this faster then any secretary he knew of that knew shorthand.

Not much of a story I'm afraid.

[jmignot]

Not much of a story I'm afraid.

On the contrary! It's a great one. Just the kind of thing I was looking for. Too bad we cannot know more details.

Bueller-san : I agree with you, but what you describe is more relevant to how kanji evolved in China, and thus to the On readings. What I had in mind was how the Chinese writing system could be twisted so as to represent a linguistically unrelated language, as it occurred with the kun readings for native Japanese words.

[Bueller_007]

Not much of a story I'm afraid.

On the contrary! It's a great one. Just the kind of thing I was looking for. Too bad we cannot know more details.

Bueller-san : I agree with you, but what you describe is more relevant to how kanji evolved in China, and thus to the On readings. What I had in mind was how the Chinese writing system could be twisted so as to represent a linguistically unrelated language, as it occurred with the kun readings for native Japanese words.

English has too many irregular words for this to happen, I'm afraid. Regular nouns could be represented quite easily, with one dog being written as "犬" and a number of dogs being written as "犬s". Likewise for verbs: 歩="walk", and then you'd have "歩ed", "歩ing", etc. I guess that you could also use kanji for irregular stuff and just expect people to know the irregular pronunciation. So "鵞鳥" would be pronounced "goose", but "鵞鳥s" would be pronounced "geese" instead of "gooses". So "s" would just become a symbol that indicates plurality, "ed" would be a symbol that represents past tense, "ing" would represent present progressive.

Something like that, perhaps?

[jmignot]

English has too many irregular words for this to happen, I'm afraid. Regular nouns could be represented quite easily, with one dog being written as "犬" and a number of dogs being written as "犬s". Likewise for verbs: 歩="walk", and then you'd have "歩ed", "歩ing", etc. I guess that you could also use kanji for irregular stuff and just expect people to know the irregular pronunciation. So "鵞鳥" would be pronounced "goose", but "鵞鳥s" would be pronounced "geese" instead of "gooses". So "s" would just become a symbol that indicates plurality, "ed" would be a symbol that represents past tense, "ing" would represent present progressive.

Something like that, perhaps?

Yes, this is exactly what I had in mind. Now I was just wondering whether someone had ever been crazy enough (and knowledgeable at the same time!) to elaborate on this, create a club of enthusiastic users corresponding with one another… and ultimately propose it to become the official system in his own country