It still makes no sense. When you speak Japanese, you’re speaking syllables, therefore you are speaking in kana. No kanji. If you’re suggesting that spoken Japanese is more confusing than the written form… overwhelmingly, Japanese people are going to tell you that this is wrong. Not just Japanese people, but any Japanese speaker.
I’ve actually noticed the exact opposite. In common usage I’m always surprised that they’re so terse and sparing with words. But it shouldn’t be surprising because Japanese is famously high-context. Less verbiage is needed because the situation and surroundings provide a great deal of context.
Again, an example would go a long way toward clearly demonstrating what you mean.
This is completely wrong and absurd. The hiragana simply tells the pronunciation of a word while the kanji gives the meaning and usually the pronunciation. How can they contain exactly the same information?
While context usually gives clues to the meaning along with the pronunciation of a word, there are cases where it’s confusing. Anyone who actually knows Japanese experiences this regularly. To argue against that is simply to demonstrate a lack of familiarity with the language.
Show us how the following wouldn’t lose meanings.
Both of these sentences are both pronounced exactly the same:
鼻が高い (His) nose is big.
花が高い The flowers are expensive.
hanagataki
Even if you don’t understand Japanese, you can clearly see that they are different characters and have completely different meanings.
It’s an absurd position to take that the hiragana is exactly the same as kanji and hiragana.
For people who don’t understand Japanese, it’s not obvious why kanji are so crucial for reading sentences normally, but
Because Japanese doesn’t have spaces, there are sentences where the break in words is ambiguous.
Thisiswhatjapaneselookslikewhenitiswrittenifitwerewriiteninenglishandnotintheirnativelanguage.therearenospacessoyouhavetosupplythebreaksbetweenwordsyourselfandifyouguesswrongthenyouhavetogobackandguessagainperhapsacoupleoftimes.
Not only do the kanji provide meanings for the words, they allow the sentences to be read normally. Yes, it is possible to read the sentences above, but it’s not simply just like English written in all caps.
Look, kanji, like every other writing system, provides one piece of information that the syllables themselves don’t contain: how the word is written. And that’s a clue as to which word was intended. That’s just how writing works!
Right. If you encounter these sentences in an artificially decontextualized setting, then it will be ambiguous. You resolve that ambiguity by asking for context, or asking how it’s written. Same as any other writing system. But in a real-life situation, it would be exceptional to encounter a real-life situation and think “is this about flowers or is it about a nose?”
All I’m saying here is that in normal, natural usage, hiragana representations are adequate to represent the meaning. Obviously kanji help resolve homophone ambiguities more easily, especially when words are artificially decontextualized. But given that spoken Japanese functions perfectly well without kanji, we cannot say that kana (in natural context) has any less or different meaning than kanji.
You are clearly wrong about writing Japanese sentences being equivalent to writing in all caps. THIS IS NOT DIFFICULT TO READ AT ALL AND YOU COULD READ THIS ALL DAY WITHOUT GETTING TIRED.
Thisiswhatjapaneselookslikewhenitiswrittenifitwerewriiteninenglishandnotintheirnativelanguage.therearenospacessoyouhavetosupplythebreaksbetweenwordsyourselfandifyouguesswrongthenyouhavetogobackandguessagainperhapsacoupleoftimes.tryreadingaseveralhungredpagenoveloratechnicaljournalwithdetaileddescriptionsofwhateveryouhappentobeinterestedinandtellmethatyouwouldnotbeconfused.
These are the same?
Yes, it’s not completely impossible to understand, but that’s not what @Isamu and I are saying. The kanji function to separate the sentences into “words” which then allow the sentence to be read normally.
You are also wrong about hiragana being the equivalent of spoken Japanese. Japanese has pitch, allowing homophones can be distinguished For example, あめ (ame) can mean “rain” (雨) or “candy” (飴) depending on whether the pitch goes high-low (rain) or low-high (candy). (Kanji doesn’t actually provide an absolute pronunciation but people generally know the pronunciation from the kanji.) Hiragana doesn’t have any indication of pitch so that information is lost.
Again, it’s not impossible to figure things out, but it is much more confusing to the point where it’s damn well impossible to read anything more than one or two sentences.
There’s nothing artificial about the sentences I provided. If I opened a book and one of those sentences were there, I would know exactly what was meant. If I were to hear that sentence without context, then I wouldn’t know, but now you want to change the goalposts.
It’s clearly wrong that syllables of Japanese do not carry the full meaning of Japanese. The evidence is that spoken Japanese exists and doesn’t require kanji.
I said it is analogous to writing in all-caps. You picked a better analogy, a run-on sentence with no spaces. Which still carries the intended meaning, though (as you said) it’s not as easy to read.
The artifice is presenting the sentences in isolation, not part of a larger text. You’re not going to face a real-life situation where you’re utterly at a loss to figure out those sentences, because they’ll always be in a larger context.
Maybe this is just a semantic difference. We agree that kanji carry context that can help resolve homophones and signal word boundaries. I disagree that it’s accurate to say “kana do not carry the full meaning of kanji” because obviously people do speak Japanese without every needing to supplement it with kanji.
I would expect that this is less a coding issue, though, and more an issue that they trusted European and German engineering more, at the time, than they did their own.
I don’t know what lead to them choosing Enigma but, plausibly, they ran a few ideas past the Germans and had their encryption ideas turn apart by the Western mathematicians. From that point, they may have decided that they were well outmatched and should accept the foreign offering.
I don’t know that that’s how it happened, though. Even today, Japanese can be overly impressed by Western things for no good reason. It’s very conceivable that they just assumed that the European stuff was better.
Bonus points for the homophonic typo in the argument that the full meaning of a language can’t be conveyed by phonemes.
I think it is definitely true that different forms of written and spoken communication can convey subtleties that are not possible to reasonably encode in others. Like, in English there are visual puns that only work when written.
But none of that is relevant to whether a more limited alphabet could be used to send coded military messages. If your coded military messages require the parsing of obfuscated puns or subtle meanings, things have gone very off the rails. Military language is carefully chosen to reduce or eliminate ambiguity over noisy comms channels (think about the phonetic alphabet, or “niner” as the number after 8), and can easily be transmitted using a very limited and unambiguous character set and vocabulary. If (to choose at random, since I don’t speak Japanese) the Japanese words for “aircraft carrier” and “pilot” are homophones, the solution is not to use richer written form that can’t be transmitted over the radio; it’s to pick a different word for “pilot”.
I am bouncing back here, but the only English word in the message is the date. Japan adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1898, partly because it is legitimately way more convenient for understanding time conventions globally (which is basically its purpose, albeit originally in a religious context).
Traditional date systems around much of the world tended to be based on things like the whatever- year of the mighty ruler So-n-so. In Japan this was the Emperor; in Rome the year was based on the Consuls, in most societies the reigning monarch & etc. For obvious reasons this is wildly impractical and inconvenient for any topic, including history, science, business, or travel, that reaches across national boundaries. In fact it’s exceptional inconvenient even inside such, because it gets utterly miserable trying to sort out a consistent date for anything.
Edit: Although, just from context we don’t know whether that actually is a date. Cryptography often includes filler or fake information designed to mislead.
The date and time and so forth were also encoded (see HyperWar: JN-25 Fact Sheet), so it’s possible that some of the teletype text is envelope information added by the Allied unit who did the interception?
I too am interested in the exact procedures. Note that the codebreaking effort was sped along by the fact that many Japanese operators did not adhere to these, for instance by predictably recycling random numbers. I see references to a more thorough explanation in RG38, CNSG Library Box 116 5750/199, and of course there should be the original operator training manuals in Japanese. Does anyone have access to these?
I am unaware of any connection between the two. As this PDF shows, JN-25 was entirely a manual process, the transmitting clerk encoding the plaintext into 5-digit groups using a code book, then encrypting the groups by adding random numbers to them from another book along with an indication of the page, row, and column in the additive book where he had started.
At the receiving end the clerk would start at the proper location in the additive book to subtract the random numbers leaving the encoded groups which would then be looked up in the second half of the code book where the groups were in numerical order.
Perhaps Purple used Enigma machines. Like I said, I know little about it.
Believe that the target codes like AF were ultra secret - in that only the admirals had the list of what they meant, and so the comms people couldn’t even know what AF meant, they couldnt leak it out to the crew of the ship and to the world. AF was encrypted. Only when decryped would it say
“Next month we invade AF .”
They had teleprinters , so the system was RTTY … radio teletype.
The radio room could be sure they had a good message and hand it over to the encryption device operator, who had to set the device up with the details from the message indicator, that December 1941 example has the encryption guys notes about that written on it… then he types in the cipher text and records the decryption.
Interestingly the last section mentions deceptive transmissions… transmit fake messages to confuse the enemy.
At Leyte Gulf’s Battle off Samar . Taffy 3 is getting destroyed by Yamato and screens, but its dicy for Yamato … its losing screens and its lesser battleship friends… well they say the Japanese got a message that “incorrectly” says American battleships were about to join the battle… they weren’t… That article confirms that the Americans may well have sent that message as a deception… So the japanese turn around just as taffy three had used all ammunition… (with the faster turn due to being so close to the enemy.)
Another famous deceptive transmission was the one that revealed the planned attack on Midway. We had intercepted one of those transmissions with an unknown target code in it, and didn’t know which location that code referred to (Midway was one of several possible targets). So we spread rumors that there was a problem with Midway’s fresh water supply, and sure enough, that made it into later transmissions as " is having problems with its water supply". (I assume that there were similar false rumors spread about the other potential targets, as well).
