Hepburn Romanization: How to Read Japanese in the Latin Alphabet(fink-translate.com) |
Hepburn Romanization: How to Read Japanese in the Latin Alphabet(fink-translate.com) |
Probably the most important missing part here is the reason non-Hepburn systems like Kunrei stuck around for so long: they were designed to replace the Japanese script completely. This sounds outlandish today, but they were invented during the early Meiji years when Japan was adopting Western innovations and abandoning ancient traditions at breakneck speed. And because their target was thus Japanese people, not foreigners, they didn't need to worry about English phonology.
Incidentally, the Chinese pinyin system was also designed to replace Chinese writing, and Mao came quite close to abolishing Chinese characters entirely during the Cultural Revolution. Which also explains why it uses letters like x, c and q in ways that English readers find wildly unintuitive.
This was indeed the Communists’ original plan, but the real story is more interesting. Before taking over the country the plan was to replace characters with a pinyin-like system Latinxua Sin Wenz[1] and a whole generation in the north was taught to read this. After 1949, Mao was talked out of Romanization by none other than Stalin, who told him the Chinese language deserves its own script. Pinyin was designed after that, officially as a teaching tool, but probably by people who secretly still believed in more radical writing reform.
"…久保 becomes "Kubo" without the long vowel marked at all…" -- there is no long vowel! Just plain Kubo is correct.
"Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki optimize for a systematic, one-to-one mapping between kana and romanization. One kana, one romanization, always, with no exceptions." (Kunrei-shiki: exceptions! 猫は庭へ魚を運ぶ Neko wa niwa e sakana o hakobu)
Also: "Romanization is a scaffold, not a destination." ? I TOO AM A HUMAN WRITER WHO WRITES WITH MY OWN FINGERS.
But the history of the Romaji movement is indeed interesting - there were influential people who were quite serious about moving entirely to romaji at one point! It would have changed everything.
Learning the katakana pronunciation of English learn words can be fun. There was a popular TV commercial jingle for “McDonald’s” that only works in Japanese because “makudonarudo” has more syllables.
That's why Nihon-shiki is and will likely always remain the best system for serious students of Japanese - if you even need it at all. But then again, if you're just starting out, the best place to start is usually to immediately start learning kana.
This is a silly argument because anyone learning Japanese is going to need to learn how to pronounce it anyway. Also "serious Japanese learners" would likely be using kana.
Remembering both Hiragana and Katakana took me no more than a day each. Although I have to admit that I already tried learning them around 5 years ago and gave up back then out of lack of motivation.
I’m not trying to say you should avoid kana, just that there is some amount of intuition you can develop with romaji that does not work in kana.
I think the exception is people using the JSL textbooks :) there is a reasonable defense to using JSL. But you’re right. I think it’s indefensible to teach Hepburn to people interested in learning Japanese.
While that is true, the kana themselves are not fully systematic for capturing Japanese. Hepburn can capture features that kana do not!
How about this set of examples, which shows both an advantage and drawback of Hepburn.
The hiragana sequence こうり (ko-u-ri) could be several things. one is 小売 (retail) where the division is こ・うり. Or it could be 公理 (axiom, self-evident truth) where the dividion is こう・り. Here the う in こう is no longer u but a vowel lengthening mark.
Hepburn spells these words differnetly: kouri and kōri.
Now, within this same example cluster we ecounter this: the word for ice is こおり （ko-o-ri). Unfortunately, Hepburn has this as kõri, creating an ambiguity not found in kana.
A modification to Hepburn allowing (or rather requiring) the spelling koori would resolve that.
> Three Japanese words, three Hepburn transcriptions. The letters you already know, telling you what they sound like.
I mean come on.
I'm having difficulty seeing where you draw the line between “topic” and “content”. I found the article interesting as it taught me a few things that I didn't already know. I did notice the one egregious AIism that you pointed out, but the rest was readable and informative. (Although I stopped at the point where it started talking about their software Fink.)
So… letters?
The same is true with English and emoji. We do use emoji to augment the language, but that doesn't tempt us to consider emoji part of our alphabet. The analogy is weak of course, because English doesn't have an equivalent official transcription into another writing system. But you get the point. If the roles were reversed and global culture and the Internet were all in Japanese first and foremost, and most languages based their writing on kana and/or kanji so much so that you can't avoid it when traveling, then English would get an official transcription into that.
Also, the particles は を へ aren't always romanized the way they're pronounced; I can think of several places I've seen を written as wo despite being used as a particle.
Hepburn is an inappropriate method of writing Japanese, which nonetheless has become the dominant way of writing Japanese, just because it caters to the inability of most Americans to learn how other languages than English are written and pronounced.
Add to that that this is content marketing, and the whole thing really collapses. I'll consume interesting content marketing, I may even consume interesting slop, but I can't consume slop content marketing.
Besides this historical motivation, there exists no technical argument in favor of any of them.
I do not agree at all that Nihon-shiki can sabotage the ability of Japanese people to learn and pronounce English.
Except for the native English speakers, all the other people of the World who are familiar with other languages besides their own are also familiar with the fact that every language has its own system of writing and pronunciation, whose rules you must learn, including the alphabet variations.
It is the dominance of English in the international relations after WWII which sabotages the ability of most native English speakers to learn other languages, especially to learn how they are pronounced, so in foreign countries the native English speakers usually stand out much more than the native speakers of any other languages, because of their pronunciation, which is found funny by the locals.
Making the rules for writing your own language more complex for your own country and for most other countries of the World, just to make them simpler for the citizens of a certain privileged country, is not a behavior that I can approve, because I find it too subservient.
At least, that's the reason why I prefer still having kanji around.
So at a minimum, dropping kanji would mean the language needed to develop a system for where spaces go (which is less trivial than it sounds IMO). But also it would need to abandon a lot of homophones or find some way to disambiguate them. It could happen I guess, but I'm not sure how it could happen gradually.
This is a not a new method of writing, but this is how writing was done in the past, for many millennia.
The oldest writing systems, like the cuneiform and the Egyptian, also used, besides signs that indicated the pronunciation of a word, determinative signs, which indicated the semantic domain of the word, e.g. it is a name of a human profession, it is a name of an animal, it is a name of a tool made of metal, it is a geographic name, and so on.
The determinative signs could be Chinese radicals to continue the tradition, or they could be a special set of emojis.
It's a bit easier for Korean as it has far more available syllables (so fewer homonyms), but you could easily imagine these languages making different tradeoffs and ending up in different places.
I never get this line of reasoning - so are people listening to spoken japanese just in a perpetual state of confusion because they can't see the associated intended Kanji?
Also this coming from a person on a platform who's primary language is commonly pronounced with the last syllable/letter of each word used to start the next one.
The engli shlanguage ha sit sown nonsense.
Secondly, there are many homonyms: words written with completely different kanji that sound exactly the same, very similar (e.g. same modulo pitch accent) or use the same spelling in kana.
Here are two words that don't sound the same at all. Let's use Hepburn, because it distinguishes them: kõri and kouri. One has a long o, the other has separate o and u. In hiragana, both are written こうり: exactly the same. kōri might be 公理 (axiom, self-evident truth) or 高利 (high interest rate). kouri is 小売 (retail, lit. "little selling").
If you're having a conversation with someone and don't know which "kõri" they are talking about, high interest rate or axiom, you can ask. But you cannot just ask a written text. You have to work it out from context.
Kanji eliminate the ambiguity, vastly simplifying reading. Reading Japanese that has been normalized to kana is murder. Especially if spaces are not introduced to mark word divisions. That is only done in hiragana books for small children!
Sometimes this happens in writing. A sentence happens to start with a couple of words that happen to be usually written in hiragana, with some particles after them, and you're left with a puzzle just working out where the word boundaries are. This requires backtracking in the general case; there is no principle like longest match.
I think at some early point most Japanese learners (that don't already know a Chinese language) think kanji should be dropped. And at a later point I think most would change their mind as the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
Even though hiragana can be traced back to the 5th century, the educated and elites continued to use kanji exclusively until the 20th century, whereas hiragana was relegated to unofficial writing and it first became popular amongst women, hence gaining the condescending status of «female writing». Drawing parallels with hangul (as some have noticed) is not entirely correct as hangul entered the official use in the 15th century and has been in the extensive use for writing since then, even though the use of hanja has ceased only relatively recently. Hiragana entered the stage approximately four centuries later.
Katakana, on the other hand, was developed by Buddhist monks in the 9th century to translate texts from India and later to represent borrowed words. The Empire of Japan used kanji and katakana in official documents.
Then there is a distinction between the syllabary and vocabulary.
Chinese vocabulary and pronunciation has entered Japanese in three distinct waves: go-on, kan-on and tō-on. The Tang dynasty kan-on wave was particularly and enormously important as it has supplied Japanese with a major new pronunciation system, vocabulary, administrative culture and literary.
The earlier go-on wave is associated with Buddhist terminology that prefers the go-on readings, and the tō-on wave readings occur particularly in vocabulary brought through medieval and early-modern contact with China.
Therefore, the same character can therefore contain several historical layers, for example: 明 has go-on myō, kan-on mei and tō-on min as in:
明王 /myōō/ historical layer: go-on, meaning: a Buddhist «Wisdom King» (such as 不動明王 Fudō Myōō)
明王 /meiō/ historical layer: kan-on, meaning «a wise, enlightened or excellent ruler».
明朝 is even more interesting as the reading of /myōchō/, being an older myō reading, indicates «tomorrow morning» whereas the /minchō/ reading, being a tō-on, indicates «the Ming dynasty» or related to the Ming dynasty.
Neither hiragana nor katakana can preserve such details, and, depending on whom one asks, it may or may not acceptable to a Japanese national. Perhaps the younger generation cares less but it is not all that clear cut.
Sure, maybe don’t force people to learn kana first. But Hepburn is kind of the worst of all worlds, it is just a waste of time to learn Hepburn.
Rather, he (rightfully) criticized the generally negative effect caused by the deployment of anglocentric teaching methods (exclusively for the convenience of the Anglo world).
In addition, he observed a negative feedback of such strategems on the Anglo world itself, in as much as it forms an "impediment by convenience" for them to learn about other cultures (and thus rise a bit on the scale of human development).
So in a way what he said is the opposite of what you claim he did. Might that have been what triggered your inadequate reaction?
As for "arrogance", you stated that Kunrei/Nihon have been "sabotaging Japanese people's ability to learn and pronounce English correctly", as if there was any value in that for a civilization that culturally stands much higher than, say, the USA.
And as for "racism", it is well known that was an important factor on the "no prisoners" approach the US took against Japan, and also in terroristically and sadistically napalming one city after another (then repeated in Korea and Vietnam).
Sort of. The adoption of a Latin script would risk severing cultural continuity – a likely deal breaker in a society such as Japan, where history, tradition, and inherited form are not decorative artefacts but active components of cultural identity.
Consider the following two Japanese surnames that – today – are spelled as Kanō and Gotō (I happen to have a close Japanese friend with this surname).
They can be rendered as:
Kanō: 狩野 and 加納
Gotō: 後藤 and 五島
The medieval 狩野氏[0] of Izu was an established warrior lineage. Its members occur in the Azuma Kagami, and the family was active by 1180. It belonged to a Fujiwara-derived lineage.
加納[1] is explicitly recorded with historical kana カナフ. A separate 加納氏 belonged to the Miura–Sawara grouping that divided control of Aizu after Yoritomo's Ōshū campaign. The official history of Kitakata lists 加納氏 separately amongst these medieval families.
後藤[2] The 後藤 lineage is attested in the twelfth century. 後藤基清, born in 1155, was the adopted son of 後藤実基 and served as a Kamakura-period warrior.
五島[3] This is the most interesting example as 五島 came from the unrelated medieval 宇久氏. The 宇久 had already been established by the Kamakura period and later controlled the Gotō islands. After Ukuji was promoted to Bunroku's service, he changed his surname from Uku to Gotō, and developed into the Gotō clan, a daimyo of the early-modern times.
None of that historical lineage can be faithfully preserved through the use of a Latin script. The characters themselves carry continuity – visual (radicals), literary and civilisational – that transliteration can approximate only by discarding precisely what made the tradition contiguous in the first place and compressing them into a neutered phonetic contraption.
Then there is the separate issue that Chinese characters, their readings and the vocabulary associated with them entered Japanese through several successive waves of cultural import, with one particularly important layer having been introduced during the Tang dynasty, when Japan extensively adopted Chinese literary, administrative and cultural models. Different readings, compounds and usages consequently preserve historical or cultural nuances associated with particular periods of Japanese contact with China.
[0] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E7%8B%A9%E9%87%8E%E6%B0%8F-1155209
[1] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%8A%A0%E7%B4%8D-45984
[2] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%BE%8C%E8%97%A4%E5%9F%BA%E6%B8%8...
[3] https://kotobank.jp/word/%E5%AE%87%E4%B9%85%E6%B0%8F-1148019
When you're reading, you're trying to identify a substring and map it back to the unit of meaning, which is effectively the kanji. That works seamlessly with Hangul, because it mostly blocks (as syllables) the same way as kanji, and, as you mentioned, the extra vowels and silent consonants provide more disambiguation. With kana, the length you have to scan to read, and then guess at (using only context to disambiguate), a root word, is a lot more arbitrary.
Mechanically kana is just less compressed, less aligned, and makes it harder to visually identify/scan for units of meaning. Obviously Korean shows that you can make different tradeoffs, but for Japanese losing the kanji would probably necessitate reworking Kana as well - and unless the pronunciation changed, it would probably need to be in a way that represents the pitch accent, which is a modifier on the whole syllable, rather than just a few extra consonants or vowels.
What did happen was that we lost obscure words that could only be understood by looking at Chinese characters (because they're used so rarely, or because they sound the same as another more common word) - you could still use them if you wanted to, but unless you also write them in Hanja, it would be confusing, and if you mix gratuitous Hanja into your writing just because you like those words, most young readers will find it pretentious, and I fear, mostly unreadable.
I can't say we lost much by losing these words. Rather, I think it actually forced writers to select less ambiguous words, which is usually a good thing.
(Also, these days most Koreans know much more English than Classical Chinese, so English loanwords can sometimes fill the gap. It helps that most English (or other Western) loanwords sound different from native or Sino-Korean words, so there's less chance of collision.)
As for why it's interesting and useful theoretically - well, Japanese is of course older than the kana chart, and if you're doing diachronic linguistics I think taking mat- to be the stem is probably a useful frame to think about the origins of the modern conjugation paradigm.
E.g. "hashi" famously can mean bridge/edge/chopsticks depending on accent, but which accent has which meaning is different in Tokyo vs Osaka.
It's similar to initialisms or emoji in English; it's of course frustrating for people who don't know them, and there are reasonable complaints about some of the extremes, but speakers/writers use them because they find them useful when communicating with an audience that's also assumed to know them.
Kind of humorously, groups sometimes develop lingo to avoid all this. E.g. the JP words for science and chemistry both have the standard pronunciation "kagaku", so people in industries where both terms are used often use nonstandard pronunciations (bakegaku for chemistry).
Also the homophones thing is probably lesser of the things I mentioned. A typical sentence might only have 1 or 2 overloaded words, but it will have lots of substrings that can be parsed multiple ways.
Native speakers get confused in conversations and have to refer to kanji regarding which word they mean. Except they don't write down the kanji; they think of a very common word which has that kanji and say things like, "the shō syllable in my word is the same (kanji) as in shōrai".
The vast majority of the Japanese vocabulary consists of word roots made from the combination of two kanji. The language-making itself is not separable from kanji.
Japanese is only spoken language like others basically only for small children and idiots. Literate, grown-up Japanese is a written language first.
I seriously doubt that. Literacy levels rose in Japan during the Meiji era and that produced pressure towards simplification of the writing system. Sure, Japan didn't go all the way to a pure kana system or to a latin-derived script, but the reasons are political and cultural (and there is nothing wrong with that) rather than linguistic.
In any cases, you didn't disprove my point, which is that the need for kanji is self-fulfilling. It feels necessary, precisely because its usage prevents the evolution of the phonetic kana system into something useful.
Well, yes? The language is built on kanji. In a 100,000 word dictionary, the vast amount of content is words that someone made up by putting together kanji. It is kanji-first. None of it makes sense when you strip away the kanji, and formation of new words is blocked. Kanji is a cultural cornerstone.
Before literacy, commoners had 5000 word vocabularies cradle to grave. Anything beyond that was the domain of the erudite elite.
> the phonetic kana system
The kana system is quasi-phonetic. It doesn't capture phonetics accurately, like IPA, and has ambiguities of its own.
But, again, phonetics doesn't help when twelve words have identical phonetics!
Sure, you can fix all this if you just change Japanese into another language.
Well, anyway … “evil Russians colonialists”.
† I know the PC term in North America is “first nations” or some such but for those outside NA using the old term is perfectly fine.
The Cherokee syllabary [0] and the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics [1] are both scripts designed for use with North American indigenous languages, and both are still widely used (relative to the usage of indigenous languages in general).
> the one given to them by their English-speaking colonizers with had they been given any in the first place
Well, history is complicated: it's certainly true that the vast majority of the colonizers were trying to ban the indigenous languages, but there have always been a few people working with the local groups to understand and develop their languages, even hundreds of years ago. And over the last 50 years or so, there's been lots of support for language preservation and education.
> and not been all but exterminated instead
I'm not sure if you're talking about the languages or the people here, but there are some 6 million Indigenous people [2] and 700k speakers of indigenous languages [3] [4] [5] in North America today, so I wouldn't quite call either "all but exterminated".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Amer...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_languages_of_the_Am...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Canada#/media/Fil...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States...
« there are some 6 million Indigenous people » — Now where have I seen that figure before? ^^ ChatGPT tells me there are even 9.7 million people in the USA who identify as "American Indian or Alaska Native" (2020 census). I was wrongly exaggerating in claiming they had been "all but exterminated".
Instead, they were removed from the territories that underwent English colonization (in which they had not yet been confined to reservations, but gradually driven from their ancestral lands "by treaty") to what was to become Oklahoma (part of the 1803 Napoleon purchase) by the aptly named 1830 "Indian Removal Act", which is why today OK has the highest absolute number of Indians (730k), followed by Arizona, New Mexico and California (annexed from or "ceded" by Mexico, formerly Nueva España).
So, I exaggerated. They were not exterminated, but they were uprooted or eradicated from the lands of their forefathers under English colonization.
Moldova switched for a similar reason as Moldovans speak Romanian, and they did so to align themselves with Romania.
That is a total of five countries.
The actual history is rather more nuanced, as after the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks – intent, at least in principle, upon eradicating Great-Russian chauvinism and weakening the Russian cultural dominance – introduced the policy of «korenizatsiia», or «nativisation».
The new policy encouraged non-Russian populations to cultivate distinct national identities, use their own languages in administration and education and, where indigenous languages had previously lacked established writing systems, develop scripts and literary standards of their own:
«Politically and culturally, the nativization policy aimed to eliminate Russian domination and culture in Soviet republics where ethnic Russians did not constitute a majority. This policy was implemented even in areas with large Russian-speaking populations; for instance, all children in Ukraine were taught in the Ukrainian language in school. The policies of korenizatsiia facilitated the Communist Party's establishment of the local languages in government and education, in publishing, in culture, and in public life. In that manner, the cadre of the local Communist Party were promoted to every level of government, and ethnic Russians working in said governments were required to learn the local language and culture of the given Soviet republic»[0].
For that reason, nearly all new writing scripts developed between 1920's and mid-1930's were Latin based.
Joseph Stalin, a Georgian himself, ended and reversed the policy in the mid-1930's and instructed the Latin-based scripts to be replaced with the Cyrillic-based ones.
How the British invented Communism (and blamed it on the Jews) • Richard Poe @ RTF (Matthew Ehret) • 2h01 • https://youtu.be/Cxen-IzX-Gw
- “Need to” is a very different criterion from “is useful”, and “visually split” is, well, kind of unexpected to me!
- The comparison to native Japanese speakers seems especially irrelevant here,
- You’re not using your native orthography here, you’re using romaji, I don’t think it’s anyone’s native orthography.
- You probably want to use the Romaji heavily anyway, because that’s how most people will use computers.
When you’re learning a language you naturally multiple approaches to understanding a single topic. You’ll see a word written, you’ll hear it. You’ll hear a sentence and then someone will give you an explanation of the grammar, and you’ll compare that with your notes. It’s multimodal and all of these different modes are useful.
Like how romaji is useful for understanding conjugations. Obviously not necessary, just useful.
It is equally unnatural to form kana in your head when thinking about how to say something! Or, it’s unnatural to think about whether a verb is godan or ichidan when speaking, it’s unnatural to think about what particles are, etc.
You get an explanation for a concept and you internalize it. The explanation is a framework for you to internalize the concept, and once the concept is internalized, you no longer need it. The explanations are still useful, like romaji is still useful. None of the explanations are necessary, some are useful.
Maybe you get a few different partially wrong explanations of what the “wa” particle means before you internalize it. You’re not getting damaged by those explanations, they’re Wittgenstein’s ladder. (Well, maybe you got some bad explanations, but even the good explanations are wrong.)
You throw a bunch of different explanations at different students, combine it with practice and lots of examples, and eventually it sticks.
> which in this example is not actually even the same consonant
By that standard, the “t” in “butter” is not the same consonant as the “t” in “tap” (try it!)
People are really good at understanding and learning phonology and can really internalize it and understand it on an intuitive level, even if they can’t explain the rules for it. If you’re a native English speaker, you accept that there’s a “t” in “butter” and a “t” in “tap” even though they are not the same sounds (phones). That’s because they are the same phonemes.
Romaji is an effective way of writing down Japanese phonemes.
Yup, this is unfortunately the case. Colonization definitely made things vastly worse than they were before, but the modern world has become so connected that it's challenging for small languages to survive: young people want to read books, watch TV, and get an education, but it's hard to support all that in a language with only 50k speakers. Bilingualism helps a lot here, but if people can only use their languages to speak to their families, then they're less likely to teach it to their children.
For some further background, I took a class in a local indigenous language last year, so I know a tiny bit of one indigenous language [0], but that language has less than 10k speakers in total. Everyone is putting in a lot of work to preserve it, and it's universally taught in all the schools on the reservation, but unfortunately that's not even enough people to sustain a local newspaper. And to make matters worse, there are two other completely distinct indigenous languages spoken in the same city, so the indigenous people can only use English to speak to each other if they're from different tribes.
> I was wrongly exaggerating in claiming they had been "all but exterminated".
To be fair, there are cases like the Beothuk [1], but that's a rarity.
Actually, before I had looked up the numbers, I had assumed that the populations were far larger than they actually are. It looks like that the US only has twice as many Indigenous people as Canada, yet 10× the overall population. I live in Canada, so I had assumed that the proportions were similar, so you're not the only one here who was surprised by the actual numbers :)
> Instead, they were removed from the territories that underwent English colonization […] but they were uprooted or eradicated from the lands of their forefathers under English colonization.
Ah, I wasn't aware of that. Canada has plenty of its own atrocities, but we've thankfully never done anything like that.
You keep missing the point, so I'll try one last time. Look at a picture of the Rosetta stone. I can read Greek but I find the Greek part hard to read. It's written entirely in capital letters with no spacing and no punctuation. (Maybe there were people like you at the time claiming that hieroglyphs were easier to read than Greek.) Modern Greek still uses the Greek alphabet but it has evolved into something much more readable. The same thing happened to latin.
I claim that the Japanese kana system is stuck in its own figurative Rosetta era. There are no reasons why it could not evolve into something readable and not purely phonetic. With all due respect, I don't consider seriously your argument that Japanese is an exceptional language uniquely based on combination of foreign characters that can only be considered a spoken language by children and idiots. There are arguments for kanji that I find convincing, yours has to be the worst.
As for homophones, why would that be a problem? They are not unique to Japanese! For instance, in French, the only reason why 'a' and 'à' are spelt differently is to make it easier to tell them apart in writing. They are pronounced exactly the same. French has a lot more examples like that, and actually, using wrong spellings for words notoriously makes French much harder to read, even if the spelling is phonetically correct. French writing is not purely phonetic, it's only one way: if you know how to write a word, you usually know how to pronounce it but the converse is not true. Yet, it is still a much simpler system than the Japanese one. Children can fully read at age 6, although writing with few spelling mistakes takes more time.
So, it is absolutely baked in and kanji first. without kanji the following tongue twister is indecipherable.
Niwaniwaniwatori ga, uraniwanimoniwaniwatoriga iru.
庭には二羽鶏が、裏庭にも二羽鶏がいる。
中庭の中には、鶏の二羽がワニにお世話になりました。〜と、誰かに岩の上で言われた。
As for the other premise that modifying the phonetics to accomplish a simplification is based on a narrow view of the reason for retaining kanji literacy... there are important and substantive records for business, legal, and actively functional culture which exist in kanji and require kanji literacy to maintain agreement in society that is one of the differences between Japan and most other places. Who else still operates on contractual obligations from written records of the 17th century? Many current farming leases for large parts of the country are backed with the actual stamped, brush stroke written land records from then, stored at the prefecture on the original papers. Losing the ability to read and write kanji would be detrimental to ongoing cultural stability, and so it will not and should not be entertained by anyone living in that system. People living in a 'for now' mindset are irrelevant to actuality.
