japanese wackiness

[rone]

I noticed that, on my Cowboy Bebop Future Blues OST box, one of the tracks listed is apparently written in katakana, hiragana, and kanji. Why would they mix the three writing systems on the same name?

Comments

[denshi.livejournal.com]

Native japanese expressions are written in a blend of hiragana and kanji; throw in a quoted foreign expression in katakana and you've got all three.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Why blend kanji and hiragana, though?

[broken-gizmo.livejournal.com]

There are not always kanji characters to denote exactly the turn of phrase that is being looked for. Most written Japanese is portrayed as a combination of kanji and hiragana.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Right. So why not just move to hiragana for simplicity's sake?

[yong-mi.livejournal.com]

If it's anything like Korean (where we use the phonetic Korean writing and Chinese characters together), switching to solely Hiragana would not necessarily be simple.

Chinese characters (or kanji, as you are referring to them) are very dense in meaning. Sometimes what would take up to a paragraph if written out phonetically using regular language can be compressed to two (or four) Chinese characters. It is also the case that there are many words that sound the same and thus would be phonetically written the same, yet would be written with completely different Chinese characters.

[(Anonymous)]

Because writing in hiragana only would take up a lot of space, would in some circumstances be ambiguous (hard to recognize word boundaries, for a start) and, and this is the killer, it just isn't how the language happens to be written. Why does English have the insane spelling system it does? Why don't we write it with pure phonetics for simplicity's sake?

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Because people are STUPID! STUPID STUPID STUPID.

You'd think that would make sense....

[erikred.livejournal.com]

But to be honest, it doesn't.

There's a nifty little restaurant just outside a cozy little town by the shore in eastern-most reaches of Kochi where the owners have ingeniously replaced all of the kanji and katakana on the menu with hiragana. The effect is similar to reading English written completely phonetically, i.e., you want some aspirin to go with the lunch you've had to work so hard to order.

Give me the kanji any day of the week.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Bah, you pansy. It would be a blessing to read phonetically written English, once i got used to it. Then again, i'm fluent on Spanish, so that's probably an advantage (not that Spanish is perfect, what with ll and rr and gue and que, but almost).

[erikred.livejournal.com]

Look, just 'cos your puny little mind cannot instantaneously parse ideographs and complex-yet-standardizd spelling schemes is no reason to penalize the rest of us, you Harrison Bergeron-hater.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I think i'm going to insitute a "maximum height" for comments in my journal.

[denshi.livejournal.com]

1. The vocabulary in hiragana is larger than the vocabulary in kanji. An author cannot always assume a reader knows the appropriate kanji, aside from the core 1200 (or whatever; basic adult readership) or the ~5000 that the average adult reader knows. Rant, rant, rant.

2. Even some words written in kanji used hiragana for modifiers, verb endings, etc.

3. Grammatical elements (conjunctions, particles, etc) are written in hiragana.