is the extension of the
shinjitai
are the simplified forms of kanji used in Japan since the promulgation of the Tōyō Kanji List in 1946. Some of the new forms found in ''shinjitai'' are also found in Simplified Chinese characters, but ''shinjitai'' is generally not as extensiv ...
(officially simplified
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 ...
). They are the simplified versions of some of the . They are unofficial characters; the official forms of these hyōgaiji are still
kyūjitai
''Kyūjitai'' ( ja, 舊字體 / 旧字体, lit=old character forms) are the traditional forms of kanji, Chinese written characters used in Japanese. Their simplified counterparts are ''shinjitai'' ( ja, 新字体, lit=new character forms, lab ...
(traditional characters).
Simplified forms
When the 1,850 character-long ''
tōyō kanji
Toyo may refer to:
Places
*Tōyō, Kōchi, a town in Japan
*Tōyo, Ehime, a former city in Japan
*Toyo Province, a Japanese province divided in 683
*Tōyō, Kumamoto, a village located in Yatsuhiro District, Kumamoto, Japan
* Tōyō, Tokyo, a ...
'' list was produced in 1949, many characters were simplified from their original forms, and the new simpler forms became the standard kanji used in Japanese writing. For instance, the characters , , and became , , and , respectively. The ''
jōyō kanji
The is the guide to kanji characters and their readings, announced officially by the Japanese Ministry of Education. Current ''jōyō kanji'' are those on a list of 2,136 characters issued in 2010. It is a slightly modified version of the ''tō ...
'' list, issued in 1981, contained additional simplifications such as , , and becoming , , and . In addition, the character , which had already been included during the formation of the ''tōyō kanji'' list, became . A total of 357 characters were reformed from
kyūjitai
''Kyūjitai'' ( ja, 舊字體 / 旧字体, lit=old character forms) are the traditional forms of kanji, Chinese written characters used in Japanese. Their simplified counterparts are ''shinjitai'' ( ja, 新字体, lit=new character forms, lab ...
(old character form) to become
shinjitai
are the simplified forms of kanji used in Japan since the promulgation of the Tōyō Kanji List in 1946. Some of the new forms found in ''shinjitai'' are also found in Simplified Chinese characters, but ''shinjitai'' is generally not as extensiv ...
(new character form) when the ''jōyō kanji'' list was created (, , and were merged into a single character: , bringing the total number of new shinjitai down to 355).
However, as a result of adopting simplified characters, kanji that shared the same structural elements (
radical
Radical may refer to:
Politics and ideology Politics
*Radical politics, the political intent of fundamental societal change
*Radicalism (historical), the Radical Movement that began in late 18th century Britain and spread to continental Europe and ...
s or other
phono-semantic
All Chinese characters are logograms, but several different types can be identified, based on the manner in which they are formed or derived. There are a handful which derive from pictographs () and a number which are ideographic () in origin, inc ...
compounds) were not all simplified in the same way. For instance, , , and , which were included in the list, were simplified as , , and , although the first one is not the same component but simply looks similar.
On the other hand, the hyōgaiji , , and – which contain the same element () as the latter two of the three previous kanji – were not likewise given simplified counterparts. This problem arose from reforming only the most common characters rather than decomposing all characters into radicals and other constructs. This was done systematically for
simplified Chinese character
Simplified Chinese characters are standardized Chinese characters used in mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore, as prescribed by the ''Table of General Standard Chinese Characters''. Along with traditional Chinese characters, they are one o ...
s, although even in there many exceptions to the rule exist.
Creation of extended shinjitai
The ''
Asahi Shimbun
is one of the four largest newspapers in Japan. Founded in 1879, it is also one of the oldest newspapers in Japan and Asia, and is considered a newspaper of record for Japan. Its circulation, which was 4.57 million for its morning edition and ...
'' newspaper developed its own script known as
''Asahi'' characters, which applied the rationale of simplification to characters other than ''jōyō kanji''. In this script, the right element of the three aforementioned unsimplified characters (, , and ) were all simplified to 売. Characters that were simplified in this way are called extended shinjitai, as simplification was extended to characters outside of the ''jōyō kanji'' list.
Extended shinjitai was also implemented into
JIS kanji. The first version of JIS (JIS C 6226-1978), created in 1978, contained 10 characters that were simplified in this way, such as and .
JIS X 0208
JIS X 0208 is a 2-byte character set specified as a Japanese Industrial Standard, containing 6879 graphic characters suitable for writing text, place names, personal names, and so forth in the Japanese language. The official title of the current ...
, created in 1983, was the first JIS character set to extensively use extended shinjitai, adopting simplifications for a large number of previously unsimplified characters. In total, 299 characters such as , , , , (or 301 characters, when including and ) were simplified from their original forms. Simplified forms had never been used in printing these characters prior to this reform. However, the character set became subject to criticism when it was revealed that the character in the name "" (
Mori Ōgai
Lieutenant-General , known by his pen name , was a Japanese Army Surgeon general officer, translator, novelist, poet and father of famed author Mari Mori. He obtained his medical license at a very young age and introduced translated German lan ...
, a famous Japanese poet and novelist) could only be represented in
word processors
A word processor is an electronic device (later a computer software application) for text, composing, editing, formatting, and printing.
The word processor was a stand-alone office machine in the 1960s, combining the keyboard text-entry and prin ...
in its simplified form ().
* Characters marked * are environment-dependent characters ().
Reduction of extended shinjitai
Established in 1990, the JIS X 0212 set of auxiliary characters supplemented the previous character set by including both the traditional and simplified forms of certain characters. For instance, the traditional , , and characters were included, in addition to the simplified , , and characters. However, usage of these auxiliary characters in the
Shift JIS
Shift JIS (Shift Japanese Industrial Standards, also SJIS, MIME name Shift_JIS, known as PCK in Solaris contexts) is a character encoding for the Japanese language, originally developed by a Japanese company called ASCII Corporation in conjunctio ...
computer encoding was not taken into consideration, and most word processors remained unable to display these traditional characters. The Japanese Language Council meeting of 1992 confirmed the need for a unified character set that could be used in all computers and word processors.
Released in February 2000, the
JIS X 0213
JIS X 0213 is a Japanese Industrial Standard defining coded character sets for encoding the characters used in Japan. This standard extends JIS X 0208. The first version was published in 2000 and revised in 2004 (JIS2004) and 2012. As well as a ...
-2000 character set was presented as a solution to the problems of the previous character set, as the Shift JIS encoding was expanded to re-include traditional characters such as , , and . In December of the same year, the Japanese Language Council compiled a list of 22 widely used extended shinjitai (
''kan'ikanyōjitai'') and approved their use in place of their traditional variants in print.
JIS X 0213-2004 (released in 2004) made minor modifications to the script, changing character shapes and strokes. For characters that are not in the ''jōyō kanji'' list, the
''shinnyō'' radical () was changed from having a single dot into a double-dot variant. The
Windows Vista
Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...
, released in January 2007, conformed to these modifications, but confusion resulted in cases where the single dot was automatically changed to double dots in, for instance, surnames written using the character .
The ''Asahi Shimbun'' newspaper also modified its characters to conform to the new standards, and altered their ''Asahi'' characters in January 2007.
In the latest 2010 jōyō reform, taking the aforementioned radical as an example, the previous logic of one-dot corresponding to jōyō and two-dot to non-jōyō was eliminated, as for instance ("riddle") is now a jōyō kanji. This reform also clashes with established JIS X 0208 use, as in some cases less common unsimplified characters have been elevated to jōyō status in favor of variant characters with established use - for instance, as per the official jōyō table, the second character in ("reload") should be . For the most part unsimplified characters have been added to the jōyō table with this reform, except for three previous kan'ikanyōjitai (, and ), and some extended shinjitai like in favor of .
Nevertheless, the 2010 guidelines by the Japanese government also explicitly allow simplification in handwriting and do not object to use of alternate characters in electronic text, likely in recognition of established technical standards.
References
See also
*
Shinjitai
are the simplified forms of kanji used in Japan since the promulgation of the Tōyō Kanji List in 1946. Some of the new forms found in ''shinjitai'' are also found in Simplified Chinese characters, but ''shinjitai'' is generally not as extensiv ...
*
Japanese script reform
The Japanese script reform is the attempt to correlate standard spoken Japanese with the written word, which began during the Meiji period. This issue is known in Japan as the . The reforms led to the development of the modern Japanese written ...
*
List of hyōgai kanji ''ja.Wiktionary'' {{in lang, ja
Kanji
Japanese writing system terms
Japanese writing system