At least one person, at some point, on Facebook, expressed interest in the research papers I was working on for my classes at Tulane University. Here’s one:

Efficiency Through Inefficiency

One of my classes was The History of Writing. It was all about writing systems and, since I was concurrently learning Japanese, I figured it’d be a great opportunity to create some synergy in my studies and research the Japanese writing system (I initially wanted to do something on the orthography of death metal logos but after a few days of digging I was able to find all of one paragraph that mentioned anything useful on the subject [if anyone can point me to some actual research, I would still like to do this]).

In particular, I’m very interested in the pros and cons of the Japanese writing system and the debate over reforms. I think a lot of this was spurred on by posts on Language Log by Victor Mair, who is an expert on Chinese. He posts about problems with the Chinese writing system fairly often, such as here, here, and here, and they tend to cross-over with Japanese. I sorta got into some arguments in the comments of the last two, the latter with Professor Mair himself who, in my opinion, seems strangely ethnocentric when it comes to this topic.

The paper I wrote ended up focusing on reforms from the Meiji Era (roughly the late 19th century) as reforms in all aspects of society was a big issue during that time. Much of the attempts at reforms then give insight into the debates that still go on today in that area.

And if you’re wondering about the title, because I don’t think I explained it explicitly in the paper, it’s a reference to the difference between the needs of the learner and the user. Japanese writing is monumentally difficult for someone still learning it but extremely efficient and expressive for those who already know it. This plays out a lot in reform debates.

Also, this isn’t meant to be particularly scholarly, as I was just learning myself as I went along, but I think it’s a good overview on the topic.