I assume that the reader's mother tongue is some
European language, but I guess it could apply to other
people with few modifications.
Do you remember when you first learnt another
European language at school? You had trouble with the
pronunciation, you could not understand why they put the
adjectives before or after the noun, why their irregular
verbs were different from yours. These people sucked, their
language was irrational; but at the same time it was
fun.
Later you decided to learn Japanese, and you had even
more trouble. The sentences were completely different, the
writing system made no sense at all.
What's happening here? Let us consider three
languages. The first one is French. French is my mother
tongue. French is usually considered as one of the most
difficult languages in the world. Not everything is
difficult in French though. For example, the sentence
stress
always occurs on the last syllable. The pronunciation is
not very difficult either, once you have understood the
rules. So it could be a nice and not-too-difficult language but,
for some reason, French verbs are extremely difficult to
use, the grammar is awfully complicated, and the
orthography, well, we'd better not speak about it. In
French schools, the pupils spend ten years of their life
learning the rules, the variants of the rules, and the
exceptions to the variants of the rules.
It would be nice to have a language where the verbs
would be easier to use and where the adjectives would be
always on the same side of the noun. I'm speaking about
the English language. Alas, sometimes you need to
speak English, not just read it, and the trouble
begins. Each vowel may be pronounced in four or five
different ways, and you never know which words should be
stressed and which ones should be nearly mute. As a
foreigner, you know that you may live in Oxford for
twenty years, you may marry an English woman/man, you
may even understand the rules of cricket, but you will
never, never sound like an Englishman.
So what? Let's find a language in which pronunciation
is easy. Yes, it does exist: Japanese. The Japanese
language does not contain any weird sound, and the
syllables are extremely simple. Of course you need to
learn the grammar and the vocabulary again from the
ground up, but it seems normal since that language has no
common root with the languages you already know. So, is this
the perfect language?
No, it is a new nightmare. You can speak the
language, but you cannot write it, and you cannot read
it, because the Japanese use the most incredible writing system in the world. They write
their language with Chinese characters, but the Chinese
characters were invented for a language which has no
inflection, and which uses so many kinds of slightly
different sounds (tones) that an alphabet would be either
huge or inaccurate. Japanese is just the opposite: it
cheerfully adds suffixes to the particles and
particles to the suffixes, until the sentence is
completely unreadable for a Western mind. And, as we
have already seen, it uses very few sounds.
Anyway, they
still decided to use the Chinese characters, and they called
them kanji. Since the kanji were clearly not adapted to
their language, they also invented a fifty-character
syllabary (hiragana) for the inflections. Because
it was not complicated enough, they created a second
fifty-character syllabary (katakana) for various purposes,
including writing foreign words. So you have it: the
weirdest writing system in the world. And that
language, which could be simple, nice, rational, is a
complete mess. Just like English. Just like French. The
Japanese children spend ten years of their life learning
how to write their language, and after that more of them can
read and write than in Western countries.
I can see only one explanation: we need complicated
languages. It's something within us, we can do nothing about
it: we love the subtle intricacies of each
language. We don't think a language can be worth learning if it is simple. This is why Esperanto and Lisp will never win.
Thanks to Juuichiketajin for a correction about the number of Japanese kana.