I don't think that is a bad idea, but like you said it would probably die quickly. I think part of the original intention of this thread was to try some monolingual communication but it hasn't happened yet. I don't think I have the energy for something like that now, but maybe in the future if we can get a few regulars on board we could probably keep something like that alive if we agreed to post for a little while everyday.
I wouldn't mind just talking Japanese now and see if anyone responds but without a
Probably because both readings got dumbed down from Chinese 四 is sì and death is 死 sǐ. Both become し in 音読み. Same sound but the tone is different. It's more happenstance I think than anything else, though in Chinese they're still close enough that 4 is also unlucky in China.Why did the Japanese even make words for numbers sound like stuff associated with bad luck? Like "4" sounding like "死"?
They could have just called 4 "yon" (or other pronunciations besides "shi"), and avoided the whole "tetraphobia" issue.
So why did the Chinese decide that "4" and "death" should sound so similar?
They're a superstitious people and they love their gematria, so something like that would have always happened. Walking around Beijing all the graffiti I saw was just numbers, I never tried to decipher any of it, but it is a pretty interesting commentary on the difference between our cultures/races.
