Japanese writing system
Japanese | ||
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Script type | mixed
logographic (Kanji), syllabic (hiragana and katakana) | |
Time period | 4th century AD to present | |
Direction | Top-to-bottom, right-to-left
Left-to-right, top-to-bottom Right-to-left, top-to-bottom ((infrequent)) [Unicode range U+4E00–U+9FBF Kanji | U+3040–U+309F Hiragana U+30A0–U+30FF Katakana |
Japanese writing |
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Components |
Uses |
Transliteration |
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of
Several thousand kanji characters are in regular use, which mostly originate from traditional Chinese characters. Others made in
In modern Japanese, the hiragana and katakana syllabaries each contain 46 basic characters, or 71 including
Texts without kanji are rare; most are either children's books — since children tend to know few kanji at an early age — or early electronics such as computers, phones, and video games, which could not display complex
To a lesser extent, modern written Japanese also uses initialisms from the
Use of scripts
Kanji
It is known from archaeological evidence that the first contacts that the Japanese had with Chinese writing took place in the 1st century AD, during the late Yayoi period. However, the Japanese people of that era probably had little to no comprehension of the script, and they would remain relatively illiterate until the 5th century AD in the Kofun period, when writing in Japan became more widespread.
Kanji characters are used to write most content words of native Japanese or (historically) Chinese origin, which include the following:
- many nouns, such as 川 (kawa, "river") and 学校 (gakkō, "school")
- the stems of most verbs and adjectives, such as 見 in 見る (miru, "see") and 白 in 白い (shiroi, "white")
- the stems of many adverbs, such as 速 in 速く (hayaku, "quickly") and 上手 as in 上手に (jōzu ni, "masterfully")
- most Japanese personal names and place names, such as 田中 (Tanaka) and 東京 (Tōkyō). (Certain names may be written in hiragana or katakana, or some combination of these, plus kanji.)
Some Japanese words are written with different kanji depending on the specific usage of the word—for instance, the word naosu (to fix, or to cure) is written 治す when it refers to curing a person, and 直す when it refers to fixing an object.
Most kanji have more than one possible pronunciation (or "reading"), and some common kanji have many. These are broadly divided into on'yomi, which are readings that approximate to a Chinese pronunciation of the character at the time it was adopted into Japanese, and kun'yomi, which are pronunciations of native Japanese words that correspond to the meaning of the kanji character. However, some kanji terms have pronunciations that correspond to neither the on'yomi nor the kun'yomi readings of the individual kanji within the term, such as 明日 (ashita, "tomorrow") and 大人 (otona, "adult").
Unusual or nonstandard kanji readings may be glossed using furigana. Kanji compounds are sometimes given arbitrary readings for stylistic purposes. For example, in Natsume Sōseki's short story The Fifth Night, the author uses 接続って for tsunagatte, the gerundive -te form of the verb tsunagaru ("to connect"), which would usually be written as 繋がって or つながって. The word 接続, meaning "connection", is normally pronounced setsuzoku.
Kana
Hiragana
Hiragana is used to write the following:
- okurigana (送り仮名)—inflectional endings for adjectives and verbs—such as る in 見る (miru, "see") and い in 白い (shiroi, "white"), and respectively た and かった in their past tense inflections 見た (mita, "saw") and 白かった (shirokatta, "was white").
- various function words, including most postpositions (joshi(助詞))—small, usually common words that, for example, mark sentence topics, subjects and objects or have a purpose similar to English prepositions such as "in", "to", "from", "by" and "for".
- miscellaneous other words of various grammatical types that lack a kanji rendition, or whose kanji is obscure, difficult to typeset, or considered too difficult to understand for the context (such as in children's books).
- Furigana (振り仮名)—phonetic renderings of hiragana placed above or beside the kanji character. Furigana may aid children or non-native speakers or clarify nonstandard, rare, or ambiguous readings, especially for words that use kanji not part of the jōyō kanji list.
There is also some flexibility for words with common kanji renditions to be instead written in hiragana, depending on the individual author's preference (all Japanese words can be spelled out entirely in hiragana or katakana, even when they are normally written using kanji). Some words are colloquially written in hiragana and writing them in kanji might give them a more formal tone, while hiragana may impart a softer or more emotional feeling.[7] For example, the Japanese word kawaii, the Japanese equivalent of "cute", can be written entirely in hiragana as in かわいい, or with kanji as 可愛い.
Some lexical items that are normally written using kanji have become
Katakana
Katakana (片仮名) emerged around the 9th century, in the Heian period, when Buddhist monks created a syllabary derived from Chinese characters to simplify their reading, using portions of the characters as a kind of shorthand. The origin of the alphabet is attributed to the monk Kūkai.
Katakana is used to write the following:
- transliteration of foreign words and names, such as コンピュータ (konpyūta, "computer") and ロンドン (Rondon, "London"). However, some foreign borrowings that were naturalized may be rendered in hiragana, such as たばこ (tabako, "tobacco"), which comes from Portuguese. See also Transcription into Japanese.
- commonly used names of animals and plants, such as トカゲ (tokage, "lizard"), ネコ (neko, "cat") and バラ (bara, "rose"), and certain other technical and scientific terms, such as mineral names
- occasionally, the names of miscellaneous other objects whose kanji are rare, such as ローソク (rōsoku, "candle")
- onomatopoeia, such as ワンワン (wan-wan, "woof-woof"), and other sound symbolism
- emphasis, much like italicisation in European languages.
Katakana can also be used to impart the idea that words are spoken in a foreign or otherwise unusual accent; for example, the speech of a robot.
Rōmaji
The first contact of the Japanese with the Latin alphabet occurred in the 16th century, during the Muromachi period, when they had contact with Portuguese navigators, the first European people to visit the Japanese islands. The earliest Japanese romanization system was based on Portuguese orthography. It was developed around 1548 by a Japanese Catholic named Anjirō.
The Latin alphabet is used to write the following:
- Latin-alphabet UFO
- Japanese personal names, corporate brands, and other words intended for international use (for example, on business cards, in passports, etc.)
- foreign names, words, and phrases, often in scholarly contexts
- foreign words deliberately rendered to impart a foreign flavour, for instance, in commercial contexts
- other Japanized words derived or originated from foreign languages, such as Jリーグ (jei rīgu, " (bī-kyū gurume, "B-rank gourmet [cheap and local cuisines]")
Arabic numerals
Hentaigana
Additional mechanisms
Examples
Sentences are commonly written using a combination of all three Japanese scripts: kanji (in red), hiragana (in purple), and katakana (in orange), and in limited instances also include Latin alphabet characters (in green) and Arabic numerals (in black):
The same text can be transliterated to the Latin alphabet (rōmaji), although this will generally only be done for the convenience of foreign language speakers:
Translated into English, this reads:
All words in modern Japanese can be written using hiragana, katakana, and rōmaji, while only some have kanji. Words that have no dedicated kanji may still be written with kanji by employing either ateji (as in man'yogana, から = 可良) or jukujikun, as in the title of とある科学の超電磁砲 (超電磁砲 being used to represent レールガン).
Kanji | Hiragana | Katakana | Rōmaji | English translation |
---|---|---|---|---|
私 | わたし | ワタシ | watashi | I, me |
金魚 | きんぎょ | キンギョ | kingyo | goldfish |
煙草 or 莨 | たばこ | タバコ | tabako | tobacco, cigarette |
東京 | とうきょう | トーキョー | tōkyō | Tokyo, literally meaning "eastern capital" |
none | です | デス | desu | is, am, to be (hiragana, of Japanese origin); death (katakana, of English origin) |
Although rare, there are some words that use all three scripts in the same word. An example of this is the term くノ一 (
Statistics
A statistical analysis of a corpus of the Japanese newspaper
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Collation
Direction of writing
Traditionally, Japanese is written in a format called tategaki (縦書き), which was inherited from traditional Chinese practice. In this format, the characters are written in columns going from top to bottom, with columns ordered from right to left. After reaching the bottom of each column, the reader continues at the top of the column to the left of the current one.
Modern Japanese also uses another writing format, called yokogaki (横書き). This writing format is horizontal and reads from left to right, as in English.
A book printed in tategaki opens with the spine of the book to the right, while a book printed in yokogaki opens with the spine to the left.
Spacing and punctuation
Japanese is normally written without spaces between words, and text is allowed to wrap from one line to the next without regard for word boundaries. This convention was originally modelled on Chinese writing, where spacing is superfluous because each character is essentially a word in itself (albeit compounds are common). However, in kana and mixed kana/kanji text, readers of Japanese must work out where word divisions lie based on an understanding of what makes sense. For example, あなたはお母さんにそっくりね。 must be mentally divided as あなた は お母さん に そっくり ね。 (Anata wa okāsan ni sokkuri ne, "You're just like your mother"). In rōmaji, it may sometimes be ambiguous whether an item should be transliterated as two words or one. For example, 愛する ("to love"), composed of 愛 (ai, "love") and する (suru, (here a verb-forming suffix)), is variously transliterated as aisuru or ai suru.
Words in potentially unfamiliar foreign compounds, normally transliterated in katakana, may be separated by a punctuation mark called a 中黒 (nakaguro, "middle dot") to aid Japanese readers. For example, ビル・ゲイツ (Biru Geitsu, Bill Gates). This punctuation is also occasionally used to separate native Japanese words, especially in concatenations of kanji characters where there might otherwise be confusion or ambiguity about interpretation, and especially for the full names of people.
The Japanese full stop (。) and comma (、) are used for similar purposes to their English equivalents, though comma usage can be more fluid than is the case in English. The question mark (?) is not used in traditional or formal Japanese, but it may be used in informal writing, or in transcriptions of dialogue where it might not otherwise be clear that a statement was intoned as a question. The exclamation mark (!) is restricted to informal writing. Colons and semicolons are available but are not common in ordinary text. Quotation marks are written as 「 ... 」, and nested quotation marks as 『 ... 』. Several bracket styles and dashes are available.
History of the Japanese script
Importation of kanji
Japan's first encounters with Chinese characters may have come as early as the 1st century AD with the King of Na gold seal, said to have been given by Emperor Guangwu of Han in AD 57 to a Japanese emissary.[9] However, it is unlikely that the Japanese became literate in Chinese writing any earlier than the 4th century AD.[9]
Initially
The development of man'yōgana
No full-fledged script for written Japanese existed until the development of man'yōgana (万葉仮名), which appropriated kanji for their phonetic value (derived from their Chinese readings) rather than their semantic value. Man'yōgana was initially used to record poetry, as in the Man'yōshū (万葉集), compiled sometime before 759, whence the writing system derives its name. Some scholars claim that man'yōgana originated from Baekje, but this hypothesis is denied by mainstream Japanese scholars.[10][11] The modern kana, namely hiragana and katakana, are simplifications and systemizations of man'yōgana.
Due to the large number of words and concepts entering
Some
Script reforms
Meiji period
The significant reforms of the 19th century Meiji era did not initially impact the Japanese writing system. However, the language itself was changing due to the increase in literacy resulting from education reforms, the massive influx of words (both borrowed from other languages or newly coined), and the ultimate success of movements such as the influential genbun itchi (言文一致) which resulted in Japanese being written in the colloquial form of the language instead of the wide range of historical and classical styles used previously. The difficulty of written Japanese was a topic of debate, with several proposals in the late 19th century that the number of kanji in use be limited. In addition, exposure to non-Japanese texts led to unsuccessful proposals that Japanese be written entirely in kana or rōmaji. This period saw Western-style punctuation marks introduced into Japanese writing.[12]
In 1900, the Education Ministry introduced three reforms aimed at improving the process of education in Japanese writing:
- standardization of hiragana, eliminating the range of hentaigana then in use;
- restriction of the number of kanji taught in elementary schools to about 1,200;
- reform of the irregular kana representation of the Sino-Japanese readings of kanji to make them conform with the pronunciation.
The first two of these were generally accepted, but the third was hotly contested, particularly by
Pre–World War II
The partial failure of the 1900 reforms combined with the rise of nationalism in Japan effectively prevented further significant reform of the writing system. The period before World War II saw numerous proposals to restrict the number of kanji in use, and several newspapers voluntarily restricted their kanji usage and increased usage of furigana; however, there was no official endorsement of these, and indeed much opposition. However, one successful reform was the standardization of hiragana, which involved reducing the possibilities of writing down Japanese morae down to only one hiragana character per morae, which led to labeling all the other previously used hiragana as hentaigana and discarding them in daily use.[14]
Post–World War II
The period immediately following World War II saw a rapid and significant reform of the writing system. This was in part due to influence of the Occupation authorities, but to a significant extent was due to the removal of traditionalists from control of the educational system, which meant that previously stalled revisions could proceed. The major reforms were:
- historical kana usage(1946);
- promulgation of various restricted sets of kanji:
- tōyō kanji (当用漢字) (1946), a collection of 1850 characters for use in schools, textbooks, etc.;
- kanji to be used in schools (1949);
- an additional collection of jinmeiyō kanji (人名用漢字), which, supplementing the tōyō kanji, could be used in personal names (1951);
- simplifications of various complex kanji letter-forms shinjitai (新字体).
At one stage, an advisor in the Occupation administration proposed a wholesale conversion to rōmaji, but it was not endorsed by other specialists and did not proceed.[15]
In addition, the practice of writing
The post-war reforms have mostly survived, although some of the restrictions have been relaxed. The replacement of the tōyō kanji in 1981 with the 1,945 jōyō kanji (常用漢字)—a modification of the tōyō kanji—was accompanied by a change from "restriction" to "recommendation", and in general the educational authorities have become less active in further script reform.[16]
In 2004, the jinmeiyō kanji (人名用漢字), maintained by the Ministry of Justice for use in personal names, was significantly enlarged. The jōyō kanji list was extended to 2,136 characters in 2010.
Romanization
There are a number of methods of rendering Japanese in Roman letters. The
Lettering styles
Variant writing systems
See also
- Ainu language § Writing
- Chinese writing system
- Genkō yōshi (graph paper for writing Japanese)
- Iteration mark (Japanese duplication marks)
- Japanese Braille
- Japanese language and computers
- Japanese manual syllabary
- Japanese typographic symbols(non-kana, non-kanji symbols)
- Kaidā glyphs (Yonaguni)
- Okinawan writing system
- Siddhaṃ script (Indic alphabet used for Buddhist scriptures)
References
- ISBN 978-1-59033-958-9.
- ISBN 978-1-55238-070-3.
- ^ Seeley 1991, p. ix.
- ^ "Japanese Kanji List". www.saiga-jp.com. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2016-02-23.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link) - ^ "How many Kanji characters are there?". japanese.stackexchange.com. Retrieved 2016-02-23.
- ^ "How To Play (and comprehend!) Japanese Games". GBAtemp.net -> The Independent Video Game Community. Retrieved 2016-03-05.
- ISBN 90-272-2189-8.
- S2CID 21633023.
- ^ a b Miyake 2003.
- ISBN 978-4-09-402716-7.
- ISBN 978-4-09-387703-9.
- ^ Twine 1991.
- ^ Seeley 1991, pp. 143–144.
- ^ Hashi (25 January 2012). "Hentaigana: How Japanese Went from Illegible to Legible in 100 Years". Tofugu. Retrieved 2016-03-11.
- ^ Unger 1996.
- ^ Gottlieb 1996.
Sources
- Gottlieb, Nanette (1996). Kanji Politics: Language Policy and Japanese Script. Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7103-0512-5.
- Habein, Yaeko Sato (1984). The History of the Japanese Written Language. University of Tokyo Press. ISBN 0-86008-347-0.
- ISBN 0-415-30575-6.
- Seeley, Christopher (1984). "The Japanese Script since 1900". Visible Language. XVIII. 3: 267–302.
- Seeley, Christopher (1991). A History of Writing in Japan. University of Hawai'i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2217-X.
- Twine, Nanette (1991). Language and the Modern State: The Reform of Written Japanese. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-00990-1.
- ISBN 0-19-510166-9.
External links
- The Modern Japanese Writing System: An excerpt from Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan, by J. Marshall Unger.
- The 20th Century Japanese Writing System: Reform and Change by Christopher Seeley
- Japanese Hiragana Conversion API by NTT Resonant
- Japanese Morphological Analysis API by NTT Resonant