Comment by numpad0
1 year ago
> I'm simply claiming that there's no inherent property of Japanese that makes it more amenable to representation with Chinese characters than English is
what? No, anything but IPA(only technically) and that language's native writings work for pronunciations. Hiragana, Hangul, or Chữ Quốc Ngữ, would not exist otherwise.
e: would _not_ exist
Then why are both English and Latin represented with Latin characters despite having a completely different phoneme inventory?
Because one is distant ancestor of the other...? It never adopted writing system from outside. The written and spoken systems co-evolved from a clean slate.
That’s not true. English is not a descendant of Latin, and the Latin alphabet was adopted from the outside, replacing Anglo-Saxon runes (also called the Futhorc script).
Just like kanji are not native to Japanese.