If 口 substitutes for mouth -- the adjective form of "mouth" is "oral", an etymologically (and audibly!) distinct word. Should that use 口 too?
If king is 王, kingly is 王ly, and royal is 王al, what is regal?
If mouth is 口 and mouthed is 口ed, why would ate be 食t rather than 食ed?
Japan misinterpreted the Chinese writing system (already terrible) into easily the worst writing system known to mankind. It won't look cute when you go beyond two symbols.
>If 口 substitutes for mouth -- the adjective form of "mouth" is "oral", an etymologically (and audibly!) distinct word. Should that use 口 too?
Yes. And that's exactly what they do in Japan. Rather uncommonly among languages, English is a fusion between romance and germanic stems. Often you'll see two phonographic bases for the same concept: Easy ones are food: Pork/Swine, Cow/Beef, but Oral/Mouth, etc.
Japanese is similar, many words have both their Japanese native stem and an imported chinese sound. The imported chinese character was assigned to the Japanese native word, even though it sounds totally different. I imagine it's makes Japanese quite frustrating to learn as a chinese speaker, but Chinese is really easy to learn for a Japanese speaker.
That's because you're thinking in English. "Kingly" is a very English way of thinking of things (as in king-like behaviour for example). In Chinese and Japanese, there simply isn't a way to describe it as elegantly as in English
In Chinese it'd be 王道 (the tao of the King if translated directly to English), which has a completely different connotation (it's more holistic in concept (i.e. it has an overloaded meaning) when compared to "kingly" in English, which has a more singular-use meaning).
"Royal" itself is an overloaded adjective in English. AFAIK there are no adjectives in the east asian language that has the same semantic meaning as "royal" - The Japanese version would simply be 王の, which translate to "belonging to the king", while the chinese version would be 王室的 or 王室之(belonging to the king's office(I guess you could say crown)[0]). Ditto with "regal". There simply isn't any proper translation for the adjectives in English.
Other than that, in Chinese, there is the concept of a radical, which can be combined to inform the readers about the context it's used in. In Japanese, as bemmu wrote, it'd be additional kanas to inform of context.
[0]Fun fact: 之 and の used to denote the same things up to about 300-ish years ago I believe (timeline could be wrong). In Japanese 之 may be pronounced the same as の. Either way, the Chinese and Japanese words are very much the same, barring some minor kanji differences. Grammarwise, however, it's a completely different language
>"Kingly" is a very English way of thinking of things.
I'm not sure about that. Japanese has adjectival nouns (commonly referred to as na-adjectives), and the 的 suffix.
Additionally, as you identify, the の particle also serves this function; but you give it a much more restrive role that it actually has (as is typically in English language Japanese learning material. In general, の marks the genitive case, which simply means that the first noun modifies the following noun in some way. It is often used to show possesion, but can also be used in a way close to ~ly in English.
No, it's because I thought making the point in English made more sense in an English-speaking forum than making the point in Chinese. I'd go with 像国王一样(的) "like a king" or 适合国王(的) "fit for a king" for the English senses of "kingly".
The point is that, as bad as the Chinese writing system is, it's still fundamentally a writing system. 女, 娘, and 妮 may all variously mean "girl" (actually, 女 is an adjective), but they are written differently because they are different words (or, as the case may be, stems). Conversely, it makes sense to talk about the pronunciation of a Chinese character. Japan somehow overlooked this principle when trying to adopt writing, and the Japanese system is a total mess. Japanese 漢字 can only be read in context; in isolation, they represent a grab bag of some unrelated words with shared semantics along with assorted nonsense syllables.
> Other than that, in Chinese, there is the concept of a radical, which can be combined to inform the readers about the context it's used in. In Japanese, as bemmu wrote, it'd be additional kanas to inform of context.
This appears to be... nonsense? The concept of a character radical is not restricted to Chinese. It refers to a part of the character that gives you a hint about the overall meaning. For example, the radical of 冷 "cold" is the 冫 on the left, which means "ice". The radical of 切 "cut" is the 刀 "knife" on the right. And the radical of 漢 "the Han race" is the 氵, which means "water" (they're not all helpful). They are an inherent part of the character and are totally independent of any context. And the kanas you describe as "inform[ing] of context" in the OP do no such thing; they encode grammatical suffixes which have no characters of their own. Chinese uses (wait for it...) Chinese characters for the same purpose; Chinese grammatical markers, unlike Japanese ones, do have dedicated characters. Radicals are a completely unrelated phenomenon.
>already terrible
Don't quite see how Chinese is so terrible. It's a remarkably efficient mode of writing for a language filled with monosyllabic words and homophones.
Japanese's appropriation of hanzi is largely a historical accident due to geographical circumstance, but most learned in the language most would agree it's far more efficient than simply using hiragana or katakana or even romaji; disambiguation by pictographs (though in modern times they are more accurately phono-semantic compounds) is of great value in written language where space is at a premium.
> Don't quite see how Chinese is so terrible. It's a remarkably efficient mode of writing for a language filled with monosyllabic words and homophones.
It is the opposite. A writing system that requires multiple years to learn is not "efficient".
If king is 王, kingly is 王ly, and royal is 王al, what is regal?
If mouth is 口 and mouthed is 口ed, why would ate be 食t rather than 食ed?
Japan misinterpreted the Chinese writing system (already terrible) into easily the worst writing system known to mankind. It won't look cute when you go beyond two symbols.