Why do the Japanese use multiple Kanji spellings for names? Like Takashi could be 江詩, 隆, 喬士, 峻, 崇史, 孝...

Why do the Japanese use multiple Kanji spellings for names? Like Takashi could be 江詩, 隆, 喬士, 峻, 崇史, 孝, or 節. Literally what is the point of this? Do people generally know as many spellings as possible of various given names? Like of they stumble upon one in a book or something, would they know what name it is? Why are things so overcomplicated?

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True culture is power of the nation

>Why do the Japanese use multiple Kanji spellings for names?
Cultural reasons, I guess. But the language has plenty of seemingly arbitrary readings for common nouns as well, and that naturally carries over to proper nouns, names included
>Do people generally know as many spellings as possible of various given names?
The average native speaker does, yes. Or at least they damn well should know
>Like of they stumble upon one in a book or something, would they know what name it is?
Depends. If they don't know the person with that name, they'll likely read it the most common or natural sounding way. However, last names are much easier to figure than given names in general
>Why are things so overcomplicated?
I have no clue. But it's worked for them so far

Do you know the Kanji spellings of all your friends' names?

They always put the hiragana spelling of names next to the kanji when they're shown for the first time.

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All kanji has meanings.
If you don't know them, it looks meaningless to you.
Maybe, kanji name is similar to the phenomenon that you name your children after saints.

As kanji were originally imported from China they can be pronounced in the chinese way or in the japanese one, if a kanji is followed by an hiragana character the japanese pronounciation is used, if not kanji are read the chinese way, japanons correct if I'm mistaken

Sino-japanese vocabulary influences. Chinese langue is fucking retarded in that every word is a single syllable, so you have 2000000 different hieroglyphs for the relatively same sound.

I think all language has as many words as 200000 or so.
And I'm sure distinguishing noun by SEX is far more stupid.

Of course yes. at least in 99.8% cases.
We even write names of countries without referring a dictionary.
>印度、天竺

But if you meet someone for the first time and have never got to see his name written anywhere, how would you know?

No, I am talking about the exactly same-sounding words of different meaning, which is notoriously manifested in kanji, not the vocabulary itself.

Ask him straightly
>"Oh your name is Shinzo, so is it just the same as the minister(晋三)? or Shin for "credit:信" and Zo for "three:三"? or others?

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鈴木 here

Well that sounds lame as fuck that it reminds me of old people trying to name latin letters here and talk all like "S is a C but like the $ sign". But that I assume is the most efficient way of explaining spelling in Japanese.

When the reading is fairly obvious except for whether or not it's been 濁点'd, is there typically one significantly more common reading?

For instance:
深沢 - Zawa? Sawa? No idea.
角川 - Gawa? Kawa? I have no idea here either.
中田 - I have a feeling da is by far the most common here, right?

Having to make assumptions like these when I see names without the reading annoy the hell out of me.

No, Japanese and Chinese are stupid.

>Explaining spelling by telling what it looks like
>露西亜
So how would you describe these characters
>"the first letter looks like a man's face who is inflicted with tooth ache", "and second one seems like a bottle of liquor while the last one is just an "I" penetrating a box." or something?

fukazawa
kadokawa
nakata

based

It's okay, Amerika, I forgive your stupidness.

Those were but examples. Do you mean to say that there is in fact one significantly more common way of reading most names like those?

By associating them with words, of course. Not the graphic appearance - I mean, the description of "S is like the dollar sign" is not about its actual spelling but the association with the words which use said sign; the same as described in this post

Wait so,
>A: Do you know Takashi?
>B: Which one?
>A: The one with (kanji meaning)
kind of dialogues happens in Japan?

You're asking a very specific question, so I guess that you know already how the Japanese writing system works (and therefore kanji) and I'm also implying that you're only wondering about the mystery or motive behind multiple spellings for first (and last) names and *not* about why the Japanese language uses Chinese characters at all, so to answer your inquiry:
>Literally what is the point of this?
Litearlly it's just different ways to spell a word, similar to how in English "Kalyn" can be also be spelt as "Cailyn", "Kaelyn" "Kailyn", "Kalyn", "Kaylin", "Kaylynn", "Kaelynn", "Kailynn" or "Cailin", maybe up to 98% of the time you'll know that the name will be spelt as "Kalyn" because that's the original one (because it comes from "Kay" (which itself comes from "Katherine" (and this one from "Αιkατερινη")) + the suffix "-lyn"), if you have to write the name or if you really want to know how to spell it you just ask the person to write it or ask her how her name is spelt.
So, yes, people just want to be special, for example here are other related names to "Kalyn":
"Caleigh", "Kaila", "Kailee", "Kailey", "Kaleigh", "Kaley", "Kalie", Kat, Kate, Kathi, Kathie, Kathy, Kay, Kaye, Kayla, Kaylee, Kayleigh, Kayley, Kaylie, "Keila", "Kit", "Kitty", "Caelie", "Caileigh", "Kae", "Kaelea" "Kayleah", "Kayleen", "Cayley", "Kaelee", "Kayly", "Keighley", etc., but I'd say that in Japanese the significance is more profound given the particularities of the use of Chinese characters in Japanese and because kanji alone can have meaning by themselves (and those kanjis have radicals, etc.)

yep that's what i meant, though of course there are many exceptions

Alright, good to know. Thanks.

In that case, we will distinguish the two takashi by their family names.
>"Which takashi? Suzuki or Sato?"

Ah, thanks I forget there's a family name in Japan unlike us.

english is a bad example because their orthography is so far removed from their phonetics

Takashi

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>unlike us

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Yeah you know, latin script feels so cannibalized in English and French. Middle english was way more logical.

no one can speak kanji so people will ask you what kanji are used when they heard your name for the first time

this is one of the reason of huge business card culture in japan

it can happen in any language, I used English because that was the language in which OP asked the question, but for example here in Mexico is more common nowadays to see names that "used" to be spelt with a "j" and changed it for an "x", for example "Xavier" or "Ximena" instead of "Javier" and "Jimena", (ironically the spelling with "x" is the original one before the "reajuste de sibilantes" happened in the XVI and XVII centuries)

Can you even pronounce people's names if you only see them written down?

Japanese is seriously fucking retarded tbqh

and there are more examplee, like adding random "h" because in some languages it doesn't even represent a sound and in the languages that it does sometimes it doesn't, doubling consonants like "n", "m" or "s" inl languages that don't have gemination, and then you have things like "y" and "z" which was supposed to be used only in loanwords from Greek, and the "w/v/u" and "i/j" thing, and the unnecessary "k", etc.

it can happen in any language that isn't orthographically shallow

ok that was a retarded post

People generally tell their names first, don't they?

We don't have family name, just couple of first name. In the scenario like I talked before
>A: Do you know Joko?
>B: Which one? the handsome one or the blackie one?
>A: The handsome one
will most likely happen.

the orthographic depth refers to how easy is to predict how you'll be able to *pronounce" a particular written language, not necessarly how you would write them, for example Finnish (which is very very shallow) has the letter "å" which would always be pronounced as [o] and "o" which would always be pronounced as [o], so these type of things can also happen in languages with a very shallow orthography not only to ones with a deep orthography.

and not to mention that loanwords exist