the word “water” in “water wheel” and also to represent the element aqua in “aquatic.”
The second factor was that many Chinese characters stood for Chinese words which corresponded in meaning to several different Japanese words. For example, the Chinese word shang, written by the character 上, has Japanese equivalents variously read as ue, kami, agaru, ageru, and noboru, to list the commonest, just as it has such English equivalents as “on,” “above,” “upper,” “to mount,” and “to present.” This multiplicity of Japanese readings for many characters and the coexistence of both Japanese and Chinese readings for most of them means that every line of modern Japanese presents a series of little problems in reading and interpretation. The result is a writing system of almost unparalleled difficulty and cumbersomeness, which has been a serious impediment to the intellectual and technical development of modern Japan.
The obvious cure for this situation would be to abandon the use of Chinese characters and to return to the pure phonetic writing as it existed around the year 1,000—or, still better, to adopt the Latin alphabet. But this would be no easy task. In modern times tens of thousands of technical and scientific words have been borrowed from Chinese or coined in Japan by joining two or more Chinese characters and pronouncing the resulting compound in the Chinese way. Unfortunately, Chinese type words in the Japanese vocabulary run very strongly to homophones. A standard dictionary lists no less than twenty distinct words, mostly of Chinese type, pronounced kōkō, and an exhaustive list of more specialized scientific terminology would probably add