Comment on UTF-8 history (2003)parentComments−kps11moSame with Japan using mostly kanji when they have a syllabary available (while Korea invented a pretty neat alphabet and largely dropped hanja).−kevin_thibedeau11moJapanese has (slightly) more homophones and favors monosyllabic Sino-Japanese in compound words. That makes it hard to depend entirely on phonetic script. Same reason why English retains irregular spellings to help with some disambiguation.
Comments
Same with Japan using mostly kanji when they have a syllabary available (while Korea invented a pretty neat alphabet and largely dropped hanja).
Japanese has (slightly) more homophones and favors monosyllabic Sino-Japanese in compound words. That makes it hard to depend entirely on phonetic script. Same reason why English retains irregular spellings to help with some disambiguation.