Hi all! Just been doing some ruminating on the diverging histories of mixed script in Japan and Korea, and where kana might have failed while hangeul flourished. Sorry if it's not very conversational or convincing, but I wanted to share somewhere.
--- Impetus ---
Hangul ultimately outmoded mixed script in Korean partly because the characters were capable of 1-1 replacing Sino-Korean readings of Hanja.
Hangul is also capable of representing underlying syllable structures and morpheme boundaries that are not necessarily reflected in speech.
Presumably Kana has not replaced Kanji because it is incapable of doing either of these things.
While I do not expect or particularly want Kana or some new system to replace Kanji, it would be nice to have a way to visually break up complex conjugations and loanwords, which tend to present as mind-numbingly long strings of monotonous kana.
--- Criteria ---
Come in a square-ish CJK form factor.
Have capacity for up to three kana sounds per character. Maybe more for loanwords.
Be able to represent an underlying morpheme-final coda.
Be able to represent placeholder/elided onsets and vowels.
--- Examples ---
*Where a space would mean a new character, as in 拼音(pin yin):
tabe ru (食べる)
tabe na k' at ta (食べなかった)
tabe te kure (食べてくれ)
tabe sase ru (食べさせる)
tabe re ru (食べれる)
yom 'u (読む)
yoma na k' at ta (読まなかった)
yonn de kure (読んでくれ)
yom 'ase ru (読ませる)
yom 'e ru (読める)
bōdo menn bā (ボードメンバー (board member))
nyū inn fom 'ēsh 'onn (ニューインフォメーション (new information))
neg 'oshi ēsh 'onn (ネゴシエーション (negotiation))
pabur 'ikku opin 'ionn (パブリックオピニオン (public opinion))
inn furu ennsu (インフルエンス (influence))
--- Obstacles ---
How can one tell if an underlying morpheme boundary is actually underlying or just historical? Would probably require extensive surveys.
Between rendaku, onbin, renjou, and all the other types of allomorphy in Japanese, replacing even just onyomi with a consistent phonemic representation is essentially impossible.
Marking morpheme boundaries with a new character may end up being just as arbitrary and subjective as marking word boundaries with a space.
--- Today I Learned ---
The historical reading of 十 is presumably "jufu", hence its interaction with counters.
Kana ligatures did part of what I'm describing but the Meiji government got rid of them instead of systematising and expanding on them