Hyōgai kanji
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, also known as , is a term for Japanese
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 ...
outside the two major lists of jōyō kanji, which are taught in primary and secondary school, and the
jinmeiyō kanji are a set of 863 Chinese characters known as "name kanji" in English. They are a supplementary list of characters that can legally be used in registered personal names in Japan, despite not being in the official list of "commonly used character ...
, which are additional kanji that are officially allowed for use in personal names. The term is also encountered but it designates all the kanji outside the list of jōyō kanji, including the jinmeiyō kanji.


Number of hyōgaiji

Because hyōgaiji is a catch-all category for "all unlisted kanji", there is no comprehensive list, nor is there a definitive count of how many hyōgaiji exist. The highest level of the Kanji kentei (test of kanji aptitude) tests approximately 6,000 characters, of which 2,999 are hyōgaiji. While in principle any Chinese character or newly coined variant may be used as hyōgaiji, the ''
Kangxi Dictionary The ''Kangxi Dictionary'' ( (Compendium of standard characters from the Kangxi period), published in 1716, was the most authoritative dictionary of Chinese characters from the 18th century through the early 20th. The Kangxi Emperor of the Qing ...
'' and the 20th century '' Dai Kan-Wa jiten'', both extremely comprehensive, contain about 47,000 and 50,000 characters, respectively, of which over 40,000 would be classed as hyōgaiji or non-standard variants if used in Japanese.


Traditional and simplified forms

While many jōyō-kanji are printed using simplified forms (shinjitai, in opposition to traditional forms), hyōgaiji are officially printed with traditional forms such as 臍, even if some simplified variants are officially recognized in print, such as the simplified 唖, from the traditional 啞 as well as 内 from 內.See the official list published in 2000 表外漢字字体表, where there are 22 simplified non-joyo kanji variants commonly used in print called 簡易慣用字体. http://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/shingi/old_bunka/kokugo_index/toushin/1325296.htm The Jinmeiyō-kanji list (used for names) recognizes in most cases the traditional form along with the simplified form (when one exists). However, other unofficial simplified forms exist, known as – these come by applying the same simplification processes as in the development of shinjitai. The newspaper ''
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 ...
'' developed its own simplified characters, known as
Asahi characters are forms of Kanji particular to the ''Asahi Shimbun'' newspaper. Unlike Simplified Chinese, where simplifications apply to all characters, the general custom in Japanese publications is to print Jōyō/Jinmeiyō Kanji in simplified Shinjitai fo ...
, and they have their own
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
code points. Some of these simplifications are part of the standard
JIS X 0208 JIS X 0208 is a 2-byte character set specified as a Japanese Industrial Standards, Japanese Industrial Standard, containing 6879 graphic characters suitable for writing text, place names, personal names, and so forth in the Japanese language. Th ...
and later versions. Among extended shinjitai, only a few are ''
de facto ''De facto'' ( ; , "in fact") describes practices that exist in reality, whether or not they are officially recognized by laws or other formal norms. It is commonly used to refer to what happens in practice, in contrast with ''de jure'' ("by la ...
'' frequently used, including 填, 頬 (extended shinjitai for the jōyō-kanji 塡, 頰) or 涜, 掴 (extended shinjitai for the hyōgaiji 瀆, 摑).


Japanese computer fonts

The issue of variant non-Jōyō character forms becomes apparent when using many commonly available Japanese fonts. While characters not frequently used generally retain their traditional forms, those commonly used in Japanese writing frequently are reproduced in their unofficial simplified form (
extended shinjitai is the extension of the shinjitai (officially simplified kanji). They are the simplified versions of some of the . They are unofficial characters; the official forms of these hyōgaiji are still kyūjitai (traditional characters). Simplified fo ...
), rather than their official printed form. Well-known examples include: * (''tsuna-gu'', "to connect"; instead of standard ), * (''KAKU'', ''tsuka(mu)'', "catch"; with simplified onpu ( phonetic component), rather than standard ), and * (''Ō'', ''kamome'', "seagull"; with simplified onpu, rather than standard ). Some characters are provided in both their official and simplified forms, as is the case with 攪 (official printed form) and 撹 (simplified variant), but most of these characters are provided in one form only. Thus, unlike the aforementioned "Asahi characters", simplifications are not comprehensive, meaning that ''hyōgaiji'' are rendered as a mix of both standard classical forms and unofficial simplifications. This is perhaps most obvious in the archaic kanji spelling of ''pan'' ("bread"), 麺麭. The characters, both ''hyōgaiji'', are displayed with a simplified and an unsimplified "barley" radical side-by-side, which can be visually jarring. The lack of an unsimplified variant in many fonts leaves the user with no choice but to reproduce the word as shown above. The use of ''hyōgaiji'' in computer fonts was brought to the fore with the 2007 launch of
Mac OS X v10.5 Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5) is the sixth major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Leopard was released on October 26, 2007 as the successor of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, and is available in t ...
"Leopard". This release included the fonts Hiragino Mincho Pro N and Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro N, which reproduce ''hyōgaiji'' in their official printed forms. A related weakness (though less relevant to modern language use) is the inability of most commercially available Japanese fonts to show the traditional forms of many Jōyō kanji, particularly those whose component radicals have been comprehensively altered (such as in , in , and in or , rather than their traditional forms as used in , , and ). This is mostly an issue in the verbatim reproduction of old texts, and for academic purposes.


Uses

The character is often mentioned as an example of a very commonly used hyōgaiji. While the official recommendation is to write the word in hiragana or katakana, a corpus survey in 2003 showed the kanji form to be by far the most common in practice. Hyōgaiji are often used in the names of
wagashi are traditional Japanese confections that are often served with green tea, especially the types made of ''mochi'', ''anko'' (azuki bean paste), and fruit. ''Wagashi'' are typically made from plant-based ingredients. History In Japan, the wor ...
, which draw from ancient literature.
Hyōgai kanji may be often used in
manga Manga (Japanese: 漫画 ) are comics or graphic novels originating from Japan. Most manga conform to a style developed in Japan in the late 19th century, and the form has a long prehistory in earlier Japanese art. The term ''manga'' is u ...
works for stylistic purposes in character names, place names and other phrases, typically accompanied by
furigana is a Japanese reading aid consisting of smaller kana or syllabic characters printed either above or next to kanji (logographic characters) or other characters to indicate their pronunciation. It is one type of ruby text. Furigana is also known ...
gloss to aid with their reading.
Modern
Mandarin Chinese Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of ...
borrowings into Japanese are typically rendered with
katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived fr ...
as per any
gairaigo is Japanese for "loan word", and indicates a transcription into Japanese. In particular, the word usually refers to a Japanese word of foreign origin that was not borrowed in ancient times from Old or Middle Chinese (especially Literary Chinese) ...
; however, they may be sometimes stylistically spelled with their original Chinese characters and given a non-standard borrowed pronunciation, many of these characters are technically classified as Hyōgaiji due to the difference in common character use between the languages. This is particularly common with
mahjong Mahjong or mah-jongg (English pronunciation: ) is a tile-based game that was developed in the 19th century in China and has spread throughout the world since the early 20th century. It is commonly played by four players (with some three-play ...
terminology.


See also

* List of hyōgai kanji ''ja.Wiktionary''


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hyogaiji Kanji Japanese writing system