The modern Japanese
writing system
A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable fo ...
uses a combination of
logographic
In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced ''hanzi'' in Mandarin, ''kanji'' in Japanese, ''hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, as ...
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 ...
, which are adopted
Chinese character
Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanj ...
s, and
syllabic
Syllabic may refer to:
*Syllable, a unit of speech sound, considered the building block of words
**Syllabic consonant, a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable
*Syllabary, writing system using symbols for syllables
*Abugida, writing system ...
kana
The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters (kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most p ...
. Kana itself consists of a pair of
syllabaries:
hiragana
is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''.
It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' literally means "flowing" or "simple" kana ("simple" originally as contrast ...
, used primarily for native or naturalised Japanese words and grammatical elements; and
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 f ...
, used primarily for foreign words and names,
loanwords,
onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as ''oink'', '' ...
, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is considered to be one of the most complicated currently in use.
Several thousand kanji characters are in regular use, which mostly originate from traditional Chinese characters. Others made in
Japan are referred to as “Japanese kanji” ( ja, 和製漢字, wasei kanji, label=none; also known as “country’s kanji” ja, 国字, kokuji, label=none). Each character has an intrinsic meaning (or range of meanings), and most have more than one pronunciation, the choice of which depends on context. Japanese primary and secondary school students are required to learn 2,136
jōyō kanji as of 2010. The total number of kanji is well over 50,000, though few if any native speakers know anywhere near this number.
In modern Japanese, the hiragana and katakana syllabaries each contain 46 basic characters, or 71 including
diacritics
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...
. With one or two minor exceptions, each different sound in the Japanese language (that is, each different syllable, strictly each
mora
Mora may refer to:
People
* Mora (surname)
Places Sweden
* Mora, Säter, Sweden
* Mora, Sweden, the seat of Mora Municipality
* Mora Municipality, Sweden
United States
* Mora, Louisiana, an unincorporated community
* Mora, Minnesota, a city
* M ...
) corresponds to one character in each syllabary. Unlike kanji, these characters intrinsically represent sounds only; they convey meaning only as part of words. Hiragana and katakana characters also originally derive from Chinese characters, but they have been simplified and modified to such an extent that their origins are no longer visually obvious.
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
grapheme
In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system.
The word ''grapheme'' is derived and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called '' graphemi ...
s like kanji due to both graphical and computational limitations.
To a lesser extent, modern written Japanese also uses initialisms from the
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...
, for example in terms such as "BC/AD", "a.m./p.m.", "FBI", and "CD".
Romanized Japanese
The romanization of Japanese is the use of Latin script to write the Japanese language. This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as .
Japanese is normally written in a combination of logographic characters borrowed from Ch ...
is most frequently used by foreign students of Japanese who have not yet mastered kana, and by native speakers for
computer input.
Use of scripts
Kanji
are
logographic
In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced ''hanzi'' in Mandarin, ''kanji'' in Japanese, ''hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, as ...
characters
Character or Characters may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Literature
* ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk
* ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...
(based on
traditional ones) taken from Chinese script and used in the writing of
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
.
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
The started at the beginning of the Neolithic in Japan, continued through the Bronze Age, and towards its end crossed into the Iron Age.
Since the 1980s, scholars have argued that a period previously classified as a transition from the Jōmon ...
. 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.
They are used to write most
content word Content words, in linguistics, are words that possess semantic content and contribute to the meaning of the sentence in which they occur. In a traditional approach, nouns were said to name objects and other entities, lexical verbs to indicate acti ...
s of native Japanese or (historically) Chinese origin, which include the following:
*most
noun
A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for:
* Living creatures (including people, alive, ...
s, such as (''kawa'', "river") and (''gakkō'', "school")
*the stems of most
verb
A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...
s and
adjective
In linguistics, an adjective (abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the ma ...
s, such as in (''miru'', "see") and in (''shiroi'', "white")
*the stems of many
adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...
s, such as in (''hayaku'', "quickly") and as in (''jōzu ni'', "masterfully")
*most
Japanese personal names and place names, such as (''Tanaka'') and (''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 when it refers to curing a person, and 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 (''ashita'', "tomorrow") and (''otona'', "adult").
Unusual or nonstandard kanji readings may be glossed using
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 kn ...
. Kanji compounds are sometimes given arbitrary readings for stylistic purposes. For example, in
Natsume Sōseki
, born , was a Japanese novelist. He is best known around the world for his novels ''Kokoro'', ''Botchan'', ''I Am a Cat'', '' Kusamakura'' and his unfinished work '' Light and Darkness''. He was also a scholar of British literature and writer ...
's short story ''
The Fifth Night'', the author uses for ''tsunagatte'', the
gerund
In linguistics, a gerund ( abbreviated ) is any of various nonfinite verb forms in various languages; most often, but not exclusively, one that functions as a noun. In English, it has the properties of both verb and noun, such as being modifiab ...
ive
''-te'' form of the verb ''tsunagaru'' ("to connect"), which would usually be written as or . The word , meaning "connection", is normally pronounced ''setsuzoku''.
Kana
Hiragana
emerged as a manual simplification via cursive script of the most phonetically widespread kanji among those who could read and write during the
Heian period
The is the last division of classical Japanese history, running from 794 to 1185. It followed the Nara period, beginning when the 50th emperor, Emperor Kanmu, moved the capital of Japan to Heian-kyō (modern Kyoto). means "peace" in Japanese ...
(794-1185). The main creators of the current hiragana were ladies of the Japanese imperial court, that used the script in the writing of personal communications and literature.
Hiragana is used to write the following:
*—
inflection
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and ...
al endings for
adjective
In linguistics, an adjective (abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the ma ...
s and
verb
A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...
s—such as in (''miru'', "see") and in (''shiroi'', "white"), and respectively and in their past tense inflections (''mita'', "saw") and (''shirokatta'', "was white").
*various function words, including most
grammatical particles
In grammar, the term ''particle'' (abbreviated ) has a traditional meaning, as a part of speech that cannot be inflected, and a modern meaning, as a function word associated with another word or phrase, generally in order to impart meaning. Altho ...
, or
postpositions
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
()—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).
*—phonetic renderings of kanji 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.
For example, the Japanese word ''kawaii'', the Japanese equivalent of "cute", can be written entirely in hiragana as in , or with kanji as .
Some lexical items that are normally written using kanji have become
grammaticalized in certain contexts, where they are instead written in hiragana. For example, the root of the verb (''miru'', "see") is normally written with the kanji for the ''mi'' portion. However, when used as a supplementary verb as in
試してみる (''tameshite miru'') meaning "to try out", the whole verb is typically written in hiragana as , as we see also in (''tabete miru'', "try to eat
tand see").
Katakana
emerged around the 9th century, in the
Heian period
The is the last division of classical Japanese history, running from 794 to 1185. It followed the Nara period, beginning when the 50th emperor, Emperor Kanmu, moved the capital of Japan to Heian-kyō (modern Kyoto). means "peace" in Japanese ...
, 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
Kūkai (; 27 July 774 – 22 April 835Kūkai was born in 774, the 5th year of the Hōki era; his exact date of birth was designated as the fifteenth day of the sixth month of the Japanese lunar calendar, some 400 years later, by the Shingon se ...
.
Katakana is used to write the following:
*transliteration of foreign words and names, such as (''konpyūta'', "computer") and (''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
In contemporary Japanese writing, foreign-language loanwords and foreign names are normally written in the katakana script, which is one component of the Japanese writing system. As far as possible, sounds in the source language are matched to ...
.
*commonly used names of animals and plants, such as (''tokage'', "lizard"), (''neko'', "cat") and (''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 (''rōsoku'', "candle")
*
onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as ''oink'', '' ...
, such as (''wan-wan'', "woof-woof"), and other
sound symbolism
In linguistics, sound symbolism is the resemblance between sound and meaning. It is a form of linguistic iconicity. For example, the English word ''ding'' may sound similar to the actual sound of a bell. Linguistic sound may be perceived as simi ...
*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
The is a division of Japanese history running from approximately 1336 to 1573. The period marks the governance of the Muromachi or Ashikaga shogunate (''Muromachi bakufu'' or ''Ashikaga bakufu''), which was officially established in 1338 by t ...
, 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
Portuguese orthography is based on the Latin alphabet and makes use of the acute accent, the circumflex accent, the grave accent, the tilde, and the cedilla to denote stress, vowel height, nasalization, and other sound changes. The diaeresis w ...
. It was developed around 1548 by a Japanese Catholic named
Anjirō.
The
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...
is used to write the following:
*Latin-alphabet
acronym
An acronym is a word or name formed from the initial components of a longer name or phrase. Acronyms are usually formed from the initial letters of words, as in ''NATO'' (''North Atlantic Treaty Organization''), but sometimes use syllables, as ...
s and
initialisms, such as
NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, ; french: Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique nord, ), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 30 member states – 28 European and two No ...
or
UFO
An unidentified flying object (UFO), more recently renamed by US officials as a UAP (unidentified aerial phenomenon), is any perceived aerial phenomenon that cannot be immediately identified or explained. On investigation, most UFOs are id ...
*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 (''jei rīgu'', "
J. League
The , officially is Japan's professional football league including the first division J1 League, second division J2 League and third division J3 League of the Japanese association football league system. J1 League is one of the most successf ...
"), (''tī shatsu'', "
T-shirt
A T-shirt (also spelled tee shirt), or tee, is a style of fabric shirt named after the T shape of its body and sleeves. Traditionally, it has short sleeves and a round neckline, known as a ''crew neck'', which lacks a collar. T-shirts are general ...
") or (''bī-kyū gurume'', "B-rank gourmet
heap and local cuisines)
Arabic numerals
Arabic numeral
Arabic numerals are the ten numerical digits: , , , , , , , , and . They are the most commonly used symbols to write decimal numbers. They are also used for writing numbers in other systems such as octal, and for writing identifiers such as ...
s (as opposed to traditional kanji numerals) are often used to write numbers in
horizontal text, especially when numbering things rather than indicating a quantity, such as telephone numbers, serial numbers and addresses. Arabic numerals were introduced in Japan probably at the same time as the Latin alphabet, in the 16th century during the
Muromachi period
The is a division of Japanese history running from approximately 1336 to 1573. The period marks the governance of the Muromachi or Ashikaga shogunate (''Muromachi bakufu'' or ''Ashikaga bakufu''), which was officially established in 1338 by t ...
, the first contact being via Portuguese navigators. These numerals did not originate in Europe, as the
Portuguese
Portuguese may refer to:
* anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal
** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods
** Portuguese language, a Romance language
*** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language
** Portu ...
inherited them during the
Arab occupation of the Iberian peninsula. See also
Japanese numerals.
Hentaigana
, a set of archaic kana made obsolete by the
Meiji reformation
The , referred to at the time as the , and also known as the Meiji Renovation, Revolution, Regeneration, Reform, or Renewal, was a political event that restored practical imperial rule to Japan in 1868 under Emperor Meiji. Although there were ...
, are sometimes used to impart an archaic flavor, like in items of food (esp.
soba).
Additional mechanisms
''
Jukujikun
are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of 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 subsequ ...
'' refers to instances in which words are written using ''kanji'' that reflect the meaning of the word though the pronunciation of the word is entirely unrelated to the usual pronunciations of the constituent ''kanji''. Conversely, ''
ateji
In modern Japanese, principally refers to kanji used to phonetically represent native or borrowed words with less regard to the underlying meaning of the characters. This is similar to in Old Japanese. Conversely, also refers to kanji use ...
'' refers to the employment of ''kanji'' that appear solely to represent the sound of the compound word but are, conceptually, utterly unrelated to the signification of the word.
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 (like in man'yogana, から = 可良) or jukujikun, like 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).
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 (
''rōmaji'': ''
kunoichi
is a Japanese cant term for . In popular culture, it is often used for female shinobi or practitioner of ninjutsu (''ninpo''). The term was largely popularized by novelist Yamada Futaro in his novel ''Ninpō Hakkenden'' (忍法八犬伝) in 1964 ...
''), which uses a hiragana, a katakana, and a kanji character, in that order. It is said that if all three characters are put in the same kanji "square", they all combine to create the kanji (woman/female). Another example is (rōmaji: ''keshigomu'') which means "eraser", and uses a kanji, a hiragana, and two katakana characters, in that order.
Statistics
A statistical analysis of a corpus of the Japanese newspaper ''
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 a ...
'' from the year 1993 (around 56.6 million tokens) revealed:
Collation
Collation
Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. Many systems of collation are based on numerical order or alphabetical order, or extensions and combinations thereof. Collation is a fundamental element of most office filin ...
(word ordering) in Japanese is based on the kana, which express the pronunciation of the words, rather than the kanji. The kana may be ordered using two common orderings, the prevalent ''
gojūon
In the Japanese language, the is a traditional system ordering kana characters by their component phonemes, roughly analogous to alphabetical order. The "fifty" (''gojū'') in its name refers to the 5×10 grid in which the characters are disp ...
'' (fifty-sound) ordering, or the old-fashioned ''
iroha
The is a Japanese poem. Originally the poem was attributed to the founder of the Shingon Esoteric sect of Buddhism in Japan, Kūkai, but more modern research has found the date of composition to be later in the Heian period (794–1179). Th ...
'' ordering.
Kanji dictionaries are usually collated using the
radical system, though other systems, such as
SKIP
Skip or Skips may refer to:
Acronyms
* SKIP (Skeletal muscle and kidney enriched inositol phosphatase), a human gene
* Simple Key-Management for Internet Protocol
* SKIP of New York (Sick Kids need Involved People), a non-profit agency aidi ...
, also exist.
Direction of writing
Traditionally, Japanese is written in a format called , 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.
![Japanese Writing System Yokogaki](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Japanese_Writing_System_Yokogaki.jpg)
Modern Japanese also uses another writing format, called . 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, must be mentally divided as (''Anata wa okaasan 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, , "to love", composed of (''ai'', "love") and (''suru'', "to do", here a verb-forming suffix), is variously transliterated as ''aisuru'' or .
Words in potentially unfamiliar foreign compounds, normally transliterated in katakana, may be separated by a punctuation mark called a ''
nakaguro'' (, "middle dot") to aid Japanese readers. For example, (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
The King of Na gold seal ( ja, 漢委奴国王印) is a solid gold seal discovered in the year 1784 on Shikanoshima Island in Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan. The seal is designated as a National Treasure of Japan. The seal is believed to have been ca ...
, said to have been given by
Emperor Guangwu of Han
Emperor Guangwu of Han (; 15 January 5 BC – 29 March AD 57), born Liu Xiu (), courtesy name Wenshu (), was a Chinese monarch. He served as an emperor of the Han dynasty by restoring the dynasty in AD 25, thus founding the Eastern Han (Later ...
in AD 57 to a Japanese emissary.
[Miyake (2003:8).] However, it is unlikely that the Japanese became literate in Chinese writing any earlier than the 4th century AD.
Initially
Chinese character
Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanj ...
s were not used for writing Japanese, as literacy meant fluency in
Classical Chinese
Classical Chinese, also known as Literary Chinese (古文 ''gǔwén'' "ancient text", or 文言 ''wényán'' "text speak", meaning
"literary language/speech"; modern vernacular: 文言文 ''wényánwén'' "text speak text", meaning
"literar ...
, not the vernacular. Eventually a system called developed, which, along with
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 something very similar to Chinese grammar, employed diacritics to hint at the Japanese translation. The earliest written history of Japan, the , compiled sometime before 712, was written in kanbun. Even today Japanese high schools and some junior high schools teach kanbun as part of the curriculum.
The development of man'yōgana
No full-fledged script for written Japanese existed until the development of , 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 , compiled sometime before 759, whence the writing system derives its name. Some scholars claim that man'yōgana originated from
Baekje
Baekje or Paekche (, ) was a Korean kingdom located in southwestern Korea from 18 BC to 660 AD. It was one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, together with Goguryeo and Silla.
Baekje was founded by Onjo, the third son of Goguryeo's founder Jum ...
, but this hypothesis is denied by mainstream Japanese scholars. The modern
kana
The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters (kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most p ...
, namely
hiragana
is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''.
It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' literally means "flowing" or "simple" kana ("simple" originally as contrast ...
and
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 f ...
, are simplifications and systemizations of man'yōgana.
Due to the large number of words and concepts entering
Japan from
China which had no native equivalent, many words entered Japanese directly, with a similar pronunciation to the original
Chinese
Chinese can refer to:
* Something related to China
* Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity
**''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation
** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...
. This Chinese-derived reading is known as , and this vocabulary as a whole is referred to as
Sino-Japanese in English and in Japanese. At the same time, native Japanese already had words corresponding to many borrowed kanji. Authors increasingly used kanji to represent these words. This Japanese-derived reading is known as . A kanji may have none, one, or several on'yomi and kun'yomi.
Okurigana
are kana suffixes following kanji stems in Japanese written words. They serve two purposes: to inflect adjectives and verbs, and to force a particular kanji to have a specific meaning and be read a certain way. For example, the plain verb fo ...
are written after the initial kanji for verbs and adjectives to give inflection and to help disambiguate a particular kanji's reading. The same character may be read several different ways depending on the word. For example, the character is read ''i'' as the first syllable of , ''okona'' as the first three syllables of , ''gyō'' in the compound word , ''kō'' in the word , and ''an'' in the word .
Some
linguists have compared the Japanese borrowing of Chinese-derived vocabulary as akin to the influx of Romance vocabulary into English during the
Norman conquest of England. Like English, Japanese has many
synonyms of differing origin, with words from both Chinese and native Japanese. Sino-Japanese is often considered more formal or literary, just as latinate words in English often mark a higher
register
Register or registration may refer to:
Arts entertainment, and media Music
* Register (music), the relative "height" or range of a note, melody, part, instrument, etc.
* ''Register'', a 2017 album by Travis Miller
* Registration (organ), th ...
.
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 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.
In 1900, the Education Ministry introduced three reforms aimed at improving the 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
conservatives
Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and to preserve traditional institutions, practices, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilization in ...
, to the extent that it was withdrawn in 1908.
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
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
saw numerous proposals to restrict the number of kanji in use, and several newspapers voluntarily restricted their kanji usage and increased usage of
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 kn ...
; 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.
Post–World War II
The period immediately following
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
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:
*—alignment of kana usage with modern pronunciation, replacing the old
historical kana usage
The , or , refers to the in general use until orthographic reforms after World War II; the current orthography was adopted by Cabinet order in 1946. By that point the historical orthography was no longer in accord with Japanese pronunciation ...
(1946);
*promulgation of various restricted sets of kanji:
** (1946), a collection of 1850 characters for use in schools, textbooks, etc.;
**kanji to be used in schools (1949);
**an additional collection of , which, supplementing the ''tōyō kanji'', could be used in personal names (1951);
*simplifications of various complex kanji letter-forms .
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.
In addition, the practice of writing
horizontally in a right-to-left direction was generally replaced by left-to-right writing. The right-to-left order was considered a special case of vertical writing, with columns one character high, rather than horizontal writing per se; it was used for single lines of text on signs, etc. (e.g., the station sign at Tokyo reads ).
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 —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.
[Gottlieb, 1996]
In 2004, the , 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
Hepburn method of
romanization
Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, a ...
, designed for English speakers, is a
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 ...
standard widely used inside and outside Japan. The ''
Kunrei-shiki
is the Cabinet-ordered romanization system for transcribing the Japanese language into the Latin alphabet. Its name is rendered ''Kunreisiki rômazi'' in the system itself. Kunrei-shiki is sometimes known as the Monbushō system in English bec ...
'' system has a better correspondence with Japanese phonology, which makes it easier for native speakers to learn. It is officially endorsed by the Ministry of Education and often used by non-native speakers who are learning Japanese as a second language. Other systems of romanization include ''
Nihon-shiki
Nihon-shiki ( ja, 日本式ローマ字, "Japan-style," romanized as ''Nihonsiki'' in the system itself), is a romanization system for transliterating the Japanese language into the Latin alphabet. Among the major romanization systems for Japan ...
'',
JSL, and ''
Wāpuro rōmaji
, or kana spelling, is a style of romanization of Japanese originally devised for entering Japanese into while using a Western QWERTY keyboard.
In Japanese, the more formal name is , literally "Roman character kana conversion". One conver ...
''.
Lettering styles
*
Shodō
also called is a form of calligraphy, or artistic writing, of the Japanese language.
Written Japanese was originally based on Chinese characters only, but the advent of the hiragana and katakana Japanese syllabaries resulted in intrin ...
*
Edomoji
(or ) are Japanese lettering styles invented for advertising during the Edo period. The main styles of are , found on paper lanterns outside restaurants; , used to label and drinks like and ; , literally "cage letters"; , a thick and rectangul ...
*
Minchō
Ming or Song is a category of typefaces used to display Chinese characters, which are used in the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. They are currently the most common style of type in print for Chinese and Japanese.
Name
The names ...
*
East Asian sans-serif typeface
In the East Asian writing system, gothic typefaces (; ja, ゴシック体, goshikku-tai; ko, 돋움, dotum, ''godik-che'') are a type style characterized by strokes of even thickness and lack of decorations akin to sans serif styles in Weste ...
Variant writing systems
*
Gyaru-moji
*
Hentaigana
In the Japanese writing system, are variant forms of hiragana.
History
Today, with few exceptions, there is only one hiragana for each of the forty-five moras that are written without diacritics or digraphs. However, traditionally there ...
*
Man'yōgana
is an ancient writing system that uses Chinese characters to represent the Japanese language. It was the first known kana system to be developed as a means to represent the Japanese language phonetically. The date of the earliest usage of thi ...
See also
*
Genkō yōshi
is a type of Japanese paper used for writing. It is printed with squares, typically 200 or 400 per sheet, each square designed to accommodate a single Japanese character or punctuation mark. ''Genkō yōshi'' may be used with any type of writi ...
(graph paper for writing Japanese)
*
Iteration mark
Iteration marks are characters or punctuation marks that represent a duplicated character or word. Chinese
In Chinese, (usually appearing as ) or is used in casual writing to represent a doubled character. However, it is not used in formal wri ...
(Japanese duplication marks)
*
Japanese typographic symbols
This article lists Japanese typographic symbols that are not included in kana or kanji groupings. The usages of these symbols are unique and specific.
Repetition marks
Brackets and quotation marks
Phonetic marks
Punctuation marks
Other ...
(non-kana, non-kanji symbols)
*
Japanese Braille
*
Japanese language and computers
In relation to the Japanese language and computers many adaptation issues arise, some unique to Japanese and others common to languages which have a very large number of characters. The number of characters needed in order to write in English is ...
*
Japanese manual syllabary
*
Chinese writing system
Written Chinese () comprises Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese language. Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character generally rep ...
*
Okinawan writing system
Okinawan, spoken in Okinawa Island, was once the official language of the Ryukyu Kingdom. At the time, documents were written in kanji and hiragana, derived from Japan.
Although generally agreed among linguists to be a distinct language, most ...
*
Kaidā glyphs
are a set of pictograms once used in the Yaeyama Islands of southwestern Japan. The word ''kaidā'' was taken from Yonaguni, and most studies on the pictographs focused on Yonaguni Island. However, there is evidence for their use in Yaeyama's ot ...
(Yonaguni)
*
*
Siddhaṃ script
(also '), also known in its later evolved form as Siddhamātṛkā, is a medieval Brahmic abugida, derived from the Gupta script and ancestral to the Nāgarī, Assamese, Bengali, Tirhuta, Odia and Nepalese scripts.
The word means "acc ...
(Indic alphabet used for Buddhist scriptures)
References
Sources
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*
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
{{DEFAULTSORT:Japanese Writing System
Writing systems without word boundaries