Japanese explained to programmers
I have to fundamentally disagree with the premise: Japanese is probably one of the least logical languages on the planet. To wit, it combines the written complexity of Chinese with the spelling inconsistency of English.<p>The one-to-many relationship between a given kanji and its many pronunciations makes it maddeningly difficult, even for native speakers. 生, for example, has at least <i>nine</i> pronunciations. The only way a programmer might “solve” Japanese would be with copious use of lookup tables or prefix trees.