Because there are a lot of words that sound nearly identical, way more than in English. For speech you have pitch accent, but you can’t achieve that with writing. I’m not saying it’s a good system, but at least it makes a bit of sense. But it is pretty stupid to have 2 literally identical alphabets which just look different
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Blyfh@lemmy.world 4 months agoSo what? English has eye, I and aye. Same pronunciation, different writing. You don’t need three writing systems for that.
EddoWagt@feddit.nl 4 months ago
Icalasari@kbin.social 4 months ago
Considering conlangs exist where they show pitch by having a diacritic above/below the syllable, it is pretty possible. Just not likely to achieve wide spread adoption in an established language
Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 months ago
You don’t need conlangs for that. Vietnamese does it. It’s another language that originally used Chinese writing system and then its own derivative thereof before the Romanisation came in that ks to Portuguese missionaries and then French colonialists starting in the 16th century.
Sabin10@lemmy.world 4 months ago
The Japanese alphabets are phonetic so all homophones have the same spelling. In your example all the words are spelled differently.
Blyfh@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Fair enough.