Open source dmd on Reddit!

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Walter Bright" <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:gpc2ik$2t80$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> That's one thing that's kind of nice about Japanese. Native words and 
>> loanwords are written in different alphabets (sort of like uppercase vs 
>> lowercase), so unlike English, you generally know if a word is a 
>> properly-pronounced native word or a potentially-differently-pronounced 
>> loanword. (Not that this is necessarily the original reason for the 
>> separate native/foreign alphabets, but it's at least a nice benefit.)
>
> I don't see having 3 alphabets as having some sort of compelling advantage 
> that remotely compares with the cost of learning 3 alphabets and 3 
> spellings for everything.

Native Japanese words never use the Katakana alphabet, and loanwords never 
use the Hiragana alphabet (those are the two phonetic alphabets). So in 
Japanese, each word has at most 2 written forms: one using the non-phonetic 
Chinese Kanji characters (ie, the third alphabet) and one using just 
whichever -kana is appropriate. Also, suffixes and articles (ie, not the 
"magazine" type) are always (to my knowledge) in Hiragana, never one of the 
other two alphabets.

Also, the "two" phonetic Japanese alphabets are really comparable to either 
uppercase vs lowercase or cursive vs print. So in the same sense that 
Japanese has three alphabets, we really have four.