Because there are a lot of words that sound nearly identical, way more than in English. For speech you have pitch accent, but you can’t achieve that with writing. I’m not saying it’s a good system, but at least it makes a bit of sense. But it is pretty stupid to have 2 literally identical alphabets which just look different
Considering conlangs exist where they show pitch by having a diacritic above/below the syllable, it is pretty possible. Just not likely to achieve wide spread adoption in an established language
You don’t need conlangs for that. Vietnamese does it. It’s another language that originally used Chinese writing system and then its own derivative thereof before the Romanisation came in that ks to Portuguese missionaries and then French colonialists starting in the 16th century.
Edit: although you could almost argue that romanised Vietnamese writing almost is a conlang, or at least a con-writing system, given how it was imposed on the language from the outside for the convenience of outsiders, and it has to really stretch to accommodate the Vietnamese language’s natural features.
Katakana (one of the two phonetic alphabets) is for foreign words and it’s not exactly the same - Katakana has more variations to represent different sounds basically unused in actual Japanese-origin words. For example there’s the ヴ character pronounced like “vu” but no such sound is used in Japanese words. It gives an immediate visual indicator that the word is taken from another language so it’s not like they made it just because.
Because there are a lot of words that sound nearly identical, way more than in English. For speech you have pitch accent, but you can’t achieve that with writing. I’m not saying it’s a good system, but at least it makes a bit of sense. But it is pretty stupid to have 2 literally identical alphabets which just look different
Considering conlangs exist where they show pitch by having a diacritic above/below the syllable, it is pretty possible. Just not likely to achieve wide spread adoption in an established language
You don’t need conlangs for that. Vietnamese does it. It’s another language that originally used Chinese writing system and then its own derivative thereof before the Romanisation came in that ks to Portuguese missionaries and then French colonialists starting in the 16th century.
Edit: although you could almost argue that romanised Vietnamese writing almost is a conlang, or at least a con-writing system, given how it was imposed on the language from the outside for the convenience of outsiders, and it has to really stretch to accommodate the Vietnamese language’s natural features.
Katakana (one of the two phonetic alphabets) is for foreign words and it’s not exactly the same - Katakana has more variations to represent different sounds basically unused in actual Japanese-origin words. For example there’s the ヴ character pronounced like “vu” but no such sound is used in Japanese words. It gives an immediate visual indicator that the word is taken from another language so it’s not like they made it just because.