Quote:
Originally Posted by chryuop
How strict is this rule? I have found many of those words in the link Masaegu gave written in kanji in books (and not textbooks, but novels). A couple of people I write to in Japan regularly use 事 instead of こと (another one of those words in Masaegu's link).
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Here is my personal opinion regarding this. Remember I said "personal".
おもしろい, as someone with your level of Japanese proficiency could tell from its sounds, is an originally Japanese word. We did not borrow it from Chinese. We had the word long before we first encountered the Chinese. Even though we did not have a writing system back then, the word existed.
When we met the Chinese over 1,000 years ago and discovered kanji, we kind of went crazy over it. I would liken, to an extent, this to the recent popularity of kanji in the West among some people.
We tried to write Japanese using kanji only but that never worked for obvious reasons such as the vast differences in pronunciation and grammar between Japanese and Chinese. The two langugaes are not even linguistically related to each other. This fact lead to the invention of the kana so we would be able to actually write Japanese for the first time in the history of our nation and its language.
The word 面白い, as opposed to おもしろい, was a pure invention of some intellectual of that age. It probably looked good at first but its built-in problems were also there from the beginning
because 面 means "face" and 白, "white" when the word's meaning is "funny". What was intended in assigning those two kanji was that if you see/hear something funny, you laugh and if you laugh, your face looks brighter.
After over 1,000 years, many Japanese, scholars and amateurs alike, are wondering if we should keep these creative "inventions". Writing the originally Japanese word おもしろい as 面白い (= "white-face-esque ") carries a clearly different connotation from writing in kanji the words borrowed directly from Chinese, such as 天気、月光、可能、外国、感動, etc.
Thus, those who are more conscious about these historical and linguistic matters, would prefer to write some words without using kanji. Those who could not care less would still have a choice. Everyone still has a way to write "funny" in Japanese. Who is to say which group is right? All I know is that we just disagree AND that I personally never will write おもしろい using kanji because it simply looks "wrong" to me. Besides, I always learned to write it in kana in school right here in Japan.