ludwigfeurbased:

if im interpreting things correctly it looks like there used to be a phonetic Japanese writing system where Chinese characters would represent the first syllable of the pronounced word that seems like it’d take a lot of strokes to write a single word

It kind of still does… okay. Let’s do this.

Waaay back when, literate Japanese (courtiers and monks, pretty much) did their writing directly in contemporary Chinese, which was the courtly language. Eventually there came about a system where Japanese would be written phonetically using Chinese characters, alongside Chinese loanwords (which are a big chunk of Japanese, like Latin with English) written directly.

There were some problems with this though. Chinese is tonal and Japanese isn’t, so there wasn’t one-to-one matching to begin with. And also, in that example above, Chinese was to Japanese more like Latin AND French were to English - a word would be borrowed in, and then centuries later after meaning and pronunciation and orthography had mutated so completely that it wasn’t really the same language, words with the same root would be borrowed in *again* for entirely different purposes. So it became really tough to figure out what any specific characters were supposed to mean.

Now a difficult language can be useful, especially to a nobility that wants to keep knowledge from the rabble, but things had gotten so bad that few of even the highest classes could be trained to understand texts, which made provincial administration tough. So from this emerged a phonetic alphabet, hiragana, which was first used to gloss kanji.

Eventually this progressed to the system, more or less used to this day, which uses kanji for word roots, and hiragana for grammatical particles and prefixes and suffixes that indicate structure and conjugation. Things are also fully “spelled out” in hiragana for obscure words, neologisms, or words in texts aimed at language-learning kids. This is done either in line with the text or as glosses on kanji called furigana, which can also be used to introduce a reading completely against the kanji, such as to explicate or undermine euphemism and reference.

There’s also ANOTHER phonetic alphabet called katakana. It has the same number of “letters”, one for each mora (which is a whole other planet of wax, but they’re kind of syllables, and they’re all either consonant+vowel pairs, vowels, or n). It was used to write purely phonetically, which was even easier to learn, of particular appeal to noblewomen who were in a sufficiently leisured position to read but weren’t educated in kanji literacy. These days it’s used kind of like italics, either denoting emphasis or for transliterating loanwords from foreign languages.

Both alphabets were developed by adapting prominent features of common kanji. This is also true of Hangul, modern Korean orthography, which was also the result of an attempt to broaden literacy.

Basically the lesson is there’s a ton of semantic overloading in Japanese, which is part of why Japanese humor and poetry relies so heavily on homonym and puns that translate poorly. (I remember one extended sequence in FLCL where the translators kind of gave up and tried to explain things in a bonus feature.) A lot of famous Japanese poems when written in English look pretty spare because in the original Japanese, lines carried multiple interpretations, of which only one at a time can be translated. Haiku developed by way of renku which developed by way of freestyle battles where someone gave a line and you had to give the next one while following metrical constraints, and the highest accomplishment was to give a line that would retroactively force a reinterpretation of the previous one.

I suppose the obvious English analogue is Shakespeare, where a lot of things that seem like baroque or archaic constructions are actually phrased to accept multiple readings, often one polite and one rude. Off the top of my head in the first scene of Romeo & Juliet where some Montagues & Capulets meet in the street and one group challenges the other, the response is some rococo banter that can be taken both as

“we are of course peacefully intentioned and follow all proper social protocols”

and

“we are going to kill you all and rape your sisters in the street”.

Classical Japanese poetry: it’s kind of like Shakespeare, in that there are a ton of nasty sex puns.