20 CHAPTER 1. THE SYNTAX
reliance on kanji? While it seems odd that Chinese characters are still being
used in a language that also has a phonetic script, the main reason it still
uses Chinese characters is because of a key aspect of the Japanese language:
it is homophonic.
Words in the English language, for instance, are essentially distinct.
While there are a number of words that sound the same but mean differ-
ent things, the vast majority of words in the English language only mean
one thing. In Japanese we see quite the opposite: there are only 71 dis-
tinct single syllable sounds, but there are close to 300 words which can be
wriĴen using a single syllable. It is easy to see that this means that for any
single syllable word you can think of, there will be (on average) at least
three other words that you can write in exactly the same way. How do
you know which is meant if you don’t use kanji or additional notes?
For two syllable words, we see the same thing; there are a bit over
2000 combinations possible when using two syllables (not all combina-
tions of two syllables are actually used in Japanese) but there are over 4000
words with a two syllable pronunciation. That means that on average, for
every two syllables you write, you can be referring to one of two words.
Even with three and four syllables, the problem persists, with a greater
number of words available than there are possible readings.
Because of this, Japanese is known as a ”homophonic” language -
a language in which a large number of distinct words will share the same
pronunciation. For instance, a word pronounced ”hare” can refer either
to ’fair weather’, or a ’boil/swelling’. The word ”fumi” can mean either
’a wriĴen leĴer’, or ’distaste’. The word ”hai” can mean either ’yes’, ’ac-
tor’, ’ash’, ’lung’ or ’disposition’, and that doesn’t even cover all possible
words that are pronounced similar: without the use of kanji, it would be
incredibly hard to decipher wriĴen Japanese.
Of course, one can argue that spoken Japanese doesn’t rely on kanji,
so it must be possible to do away with them in the wriĴen language too,
but this ignores the fact that just because a simplification can be made, it
doesn’t make things harder in other respects. For instance, there are no
capital leĴers, spaces, full stops, or all those syntactic additions that are
added to western languages in their spoken versions either, and yet we
keep those in for ease of reading. Similarly, the use of kanji has clear ben-
efits to Japanese as a wriĴen language: they act as word boundary indica-
tors, allow readers to get the gist of a text by quickly glossing over them,
and solve the problem of needing to apply contextual disambiguation all
the time like one has to in spoken Japanese.
However, just because they are of use that doesn’t mean that there
haven’t been ”improvements” in terms of their use in wriĴen Japanese. At