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Japanese Dictionaries
have a history that began over 1300 years ago when Japanese Buddhist priests, who wanted to understand Chinese sutras, adapted Chinese character dictionaries. Present-day Japanese lexicographers are exploring computerized editing and electronic dictionaries. According to Nakao Keisuke (): It has often been said that dictionary publishing in Japan is active and prosperous, that Japanese people are well provided for with reference tools, and that lexicography here, in practice as well as in research, has produced a number of valuable reference books together with voluminous academic studies. (1998:35) After introducing some Japanese "dictionary" words, this article will discuss early and modern Japanese dictionaries, demarcated at the 1603 CE lexicographical sea-change from ''Nippo Jisho'', the first bilingual Japanese–Portuguese dictionary. "Early" here will refer to lexicography during the Heian, Kamakura, and Muromachi periods (794–1573); and "modern" to Japanese dictionari ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Japanese Buddhist
Buddhism has been practiced in Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ... since about the 6th century CE. Japanese Buddhism () created many new Schools of Buddhism, Buddhist schools, and some schools are original to Japan and some are derived from Chinese Buddhism, Chinese Buddhist schools. Japanese Buddhism has had a major influence on Culture of Japan, Japanese society and culture and remains an influential aspect to this day.Asia SocietBuddhism in Japan accessed July 2012 According to the Government of Japan, Japanese Government's Agency for Cultural Affairs estimate, , with about 84 million or about 67% of the Demographics of Japan, Japanese population, Buddhism was the religion in Japan with the second most adherents, next to Shinto, though a large number of pe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Translating Dictionary
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''translating'' (a written text) and ''interpreting'' (oral or signed communication between users of different languages); under this distinction, translation can begin only after the appearance of writing within a language community. A translator always risks inadvertently introducing source-language words, grammar, or syntax into the target-language rendering. On the other hand, such "spill-overs" have sometimes imported useful source-language calques and loanwords that have enriched target languages. Translators, including early translators of sacred texts, have helped shape the very languages into which they have translated. Because of the laboriousness of the translation process, since the 1940s efforts have been made, with varying degrees o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kanji
are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequently-derived syllabic scripts of ''hiragana'' and ''katakana''. The characters have Japanese pronunciation, pronunciations; most have two, with one based on the Chinese sound. A few characters were invented in Japan by constructing character components derived from other Chinese characters. After World War II, Japan made its own efforts to simplify the characters, now known as shinjitai, by a process similar to China's simplified Chinese characters, simplification efforts, with the intention to increase literacy among the common folk. Since the 1920s, the Japanese government has published character lists periodically to help direct the education of its citizenry through the myriad Chinese characte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Japanese Encyclopedias
In Japanese, encyclopedias are known as ''hyakka jiten'' (), which literally means "book of a hundred subjects," and can trace their origins to the early Heian period, in the ninth century. Encyclopedic works were published in Japan for well over a thousand years before Japan's first modern encyclopedias were published after Japan's opening to the West, during the Meiji Period (1868–1912). Several encyclopedias have been published in Japan since World War II, including several children's encyclopedias, and two major titles are currently available: the ''Encyclopedia Nipponica'', published by Shogakukan, and the ''Sekai Dai-Hyakka Jiten'', compiled by the Heibonsha publishing company. A Japanese ''Wikipedia'' is also available. History The antecedents of the modern Japanese encyclopedia date from the ancient period and the Middle Ages. Encyclopedic books were imported from China from an early date, but the first proto-encyclopedia produced in Japan was the 1000-scroll '' Hif ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sino-Japanese Vocabulary
Sino-Japanese vocabulary, also known as refers to Japanese vocabulary that had originated in Chinese or were created from elements borrowed from Chinese. Some grammatical structures and sentence patterns can also be identified as Sino-Japanese. Sino-Japanese vocabulary is referred to in Japanese as , meaning 'Chinese words'. ''Kango'' is one of three broad categories into which the Japanese vocabulary is divided. The others are native Japanese vocabulary (''yamato kotoba'') and borrowings from other, mainly Western languages (''gairaigo''). It is estimated that approximately 60% of the words contained in the modern written Japanese dictionary are ''kango'', with about 18%–20% of words being used in common speech. The usage of such ''Kango'' words also increases when they are used in formal or literary contexts, or to express abstract or complex ideas. ''Kango'', the use of Chinese-derived words in Japanese, is to be distinguished from ''kanbun'', which is historical Literary Ch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Loanwords
A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because they share an etymological origin, and calques, which involve translation. Loanwords from languages with different scripts are usually transliterated (between scripts), but they are not translated. Additionally, loanwords may be adapted to phonology, phonotactics, orthography, and morphology of the target language. When a loanword is fully adapted to the rules of the target language, it is distinguished from native words of the target language only by its origin. However, often the adaptation is incomplete, so loanwords may conserve specific features distinguishing them from native words of the target language: loaned phonemes and sound combinations, partial or total conserving of the original spelling, foreign plural or case forms or indeclin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Compound (linguistics)
In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme (less precisely, a word or sign) that consists of more than one stem. Compounding, composition or nominal composition is the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes. Compounding occurs when two or more words or signs are joined to make a longer word or sign. A compound that uses a space rather than a hyphen or concatenation is called an open compound or a spaced compound; the alternative is a closed compound. The meaning of the compound may be similar to or different from the meaning of its components in isolation. The component stems of a compound may be of the same part of speech—as in the case of the English word ''footpath'', composed of the two nouns ''foot'' and ''path''—or they may belong to different parts of speech, as in the case of the English word ''blackbird'', composed of the adjective ''black'' and the noun ''bird''. With very few exceptions, English compound words are stressed on their first component ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Homophonous
A homophone () is a word that is pronounced the same (to varying extent) as another word but differs in meaning. A ''homophone'' may also differ in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example ''rose'' (flower) and ''rose'' (past tense of "rise"), or spelled differently, as in ''rain'', ''reign'', and ''rein''. The term ''homophone'' may also apply to units longer or shorter than words, for example a phrase, letter, or groups of letters which are pronounced the same as another phrase, letter, or group of letters. Any unit with this property is said to be ''homophonous'' (). Homophones that are spelled the same are also both homographs and homonyms, e.g. the word ''read'', as in "He is well ''read''" (he is very learned) vs. the sentence "I ''read'' that book" (I have finished reading that book). Homophones that are spelled differently are also called heterographs, e.g. ''to'', ''too'', and ''two''. Etymology "Homophone" derives from Greek ''homo-'' (ὁμο ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
