Incredibly interesting article. Thanks for posting.

Might be a little hard to parse for someone without an understanding of Japanese, but it’s very insightful into the history of the written language and all the idiosyncrasies that have arisen due to the way it evolved in written form.

Note: the purpose of this comment is to add further info, from the PoV of someone who studied Linguistics. I’m not shitting on the author, even if contradicting him in some parts.

I’ll focus specially on the start because the rest is mostly the author’s experiences with the language, this is fairly subjective.

Exotic-sounding grammar features like the subject-object-verb sentence structure (i.e. “anteater ant eat”) and the lack of important-sounding grammatical elements like articles (“the”, “a”)

To reinforce the author’s point:

• Across the world, SOV is more common than SVO.
• Around 1/3 of the languages of the world lack articles.

From personal experience due to Latin: [in]definite articles don’t “feel” missing if you can convey topic and comment fine. And guess what - Japanese has a topic marker.

Chinese, for instance, […] has an even more bare-bones grammar.

…not quite. There are two relevant aspects of grammar here:

• morphology - or, how many forms you have for the same word. It’s the reason why *“me eated two apple” sounds broken.
• syntax - or, the rules dictating how you chain words together into sentences. It’s why *“apples two I ate” sounds broken.

Chinese languages have a complex grammar, as any other language (including well-developed constructed languages); that complexity is intrinsic to human communication. However, where you put that complexity will change from language to language:

• Chinese, Japanese, English - dump it all into the syntax, for a simpler morphology
• Latin, Sanskrit - dump it all into the morphology, for a simpler syntax
• German, Greek - go half-way in both cases

Also note that I’m talking about Chinese languages, in the plural. This is relevant later on.

All languages have untranslatable terms.

It’s the opposite - all concepts that you can convey within a language can be conveyed in other languages. You might need more or less morphemes to do so, but you can do it.

The author himself shows why this is true, providing translations to the Japanese words.

A consequence of this is that those Chinese characters, evolved over millennia to fit the Chinese language like a glove, were a bad match for the way the islanders spoke.

It’s important to note that no writing system is “deep-tied” to a specific language. You could even rework Spanish or Russian to work with hanzi just fine.

That doesn’t detract from the author’s point though - he’s highlighting that hanzi work under the assumption of a grammar considerably more isolating than Japanese.

Sometimes, instead of using them for their meaning, they used them for (gasp!) their pronunciation.

Remember when I insisted on the plural for Chinese “languages”? Well. Which Chinese pronunciation do Japanese kanji take those readings from?

• 6th century Wu Chinese?
• 7th~9th centuries Middle Chinese?
• Song dynasty Late Middle Chinese?

A: all of them. Sometimes for the same kanji. Note that none of those fit exactly contemporary Cantonese, Mandarin or other modern descendants of Middle Chinese.

(The situation reminds me a lot English making a bloody mess of Latin, Norman, and French borrowings.)

while hiragana and katakana are used for sound-based writing and grammar stuff.

AND TO WRITE LIKE A ROBOT. YOU CAN’T DO IT WITHOUT KATAKANA. BZZZT.

I’m half-joking with this to highlight that hiragana and katakana also fulfil different aesthetic, or even informative purposes (sometimes the info is not on what you write, but how). The author himself provides another example later on, with furigana.

Anomaly 1: One Way to Write It, Many Ways to Read It

English equivalent:

• native reading: “I got 1 apple”, with 1 = /wʌn/ (one)
• French reading: “this apple is 1que”, with 1 = /ju:ni:/ (uni-)
• Greek reading: “The word «word» is 1syllabic”, with 1 = /mɒnə/ (mono-)
• sound-based reading: “I 1 the game!”, with “1” as /wʌn/ (won)

You get the idea, right? It isn’t so weird as it looks like. It’s just that Japanese uses it all the time, for the reasons already explained by the author.