Japanese writing system

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Japanese
Japanese novel using 漢字仮名交じり文 (text with both kanji and kana), the most general orthography for modern Japanese. Ruby characters are also used for kanji words. Published in 1908.
Type	mixed logographic (kanji), syllabic (hiragana, katakana), and alphabetic (rōmaji)
Spoken languages	Japanese language
Time period	4th century AD to present
Parent systems	(See kanji and kana) Japanese
Unicode range	U+4E00–U+9FBF Kanji U+3040–U+309F Hiragana U+30A0–U+30FF Katakana
ISO 15924	Jpan
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

The modern Japanese writing system uses three main scripts:

• Kanji, ideographs from Chinese characters,
• Kana, a pair of syllabaries, consisting of
  • Hiragana, used for native Japanese words, and
  • Katakana, used for foreign borrowings.

To a lesser extent, modern written Japanese also uses the Latin alphabet—examples include abbreviations such as "CD" and "DVD"—and occasionally hentaigana.

Romanized Japanese, called rōmaji, is frequently used by foreign students of Japanese, who have not yet mastered the three main scripts, and by native speakers for computer input.

Here is an example of a newspaper headline (from the Asahi Shimbun on 19 April 2004) that uses all four scripts: (kanji (red), hiragana (blue), katakana (green), and Latin Alphabet and Arabic numerals (black)):

ラドクリフ、マラソン五輪代表に1万m出場にも含み

The same headline, transliterated to the Latin alphabet:

Radokurifu, Marason gorin daihyō ni ichi-man mētoru shutsujō ni mo fukumi

The same headline, translated to English:

"Radcliffe to compete in Olympic marathon, also implied to appear in the 10,000 m"

Here are some examples of words written in Japanese:

Kanji	Hiragana	Katakana	Rōmaji	English
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	トウキョウ	tōkyō	Tokyo (the capital of Japan), literally eastern capital

Collation (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 (fifty-sound) ordering, or the old-fashioned iroha ordering. Kanji dictionaries are collated using the radical system.

Contents 1 Usage of scripts 1.1 Choice 2 Direction of writing 3 History of the Japanese script 3.1 Importation of kanji 3.2 The development of Man'yōgana 3.3 Script reforms 3.3.1 Meiji period 3.3.2 Pre-World War II 3.3.3 Post-World War II 4 Nuances 5 Romanization 5.1 Lettering styles 5.2 Variant writing systems 6 See also 7 References 8 External links

[edit] Usage of scripts

Most Japanese sentences (like "the cat sat on the mat") contain both kanji and hiragana. Kanji is used for nouns (words like "cat" or "mat") and the stems of verbs (words like "sat"), and hiragana for the endings of verbs and for grammatical particles (small, common words such as the Japanese equivalents to the English "on" and "to"). Foreign borrowings are normally spelled in katakana.

Kanji (漢字) are used for:

• nouns
• stems of adjectives and verbs
• Japanese names.

Hiragana (平仮名) are used to write:

• inflectional endings for adjectives and verbs (okurigana 送り仮名)
• grammatical particles (joshi 助詞)
• words that lack a kanji, where the kanji is obscure, difficult to typeset, is considered too difficult (as in children's books)
• phonetic renderings of kanji pronunciation (furigana 振り仮名). Furigana may aid children or nonnative speakers or clarify nonstandard, rare, or ambiguous readings.

Katakana (片仮名) are used to write:

• foreign words and names
• commonly used animals, plants or objects whose kanji are rare, such as "tokage" (lizard), "bara" (rose), "rōsoku" (candle)
• onomatopoeia
• emphasis, much like italicisation in European languages
• technical and scientific terms, such as plant, animal, and mineral names.

The Latin alphabet (ローマ字) is used to write:

• Latin-alphabet acronyms and initialisms, such as NATO or 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

Hentaigana, a set of archaic kana obsoleted by the Meiji reformation, are sometimes used to impart an archaic flavour, such as in items of foods.

The above rules have many exceptions. For example, Japanese names may be written in kanji, hiragana, katakana, or some combination thereof. Some foreign borrowings that have been naturalized early or rendered with kanji may be not rendered in katakana. Arabic numerals are commonly used to write numbers in horizontal text.

[edit] Choice

Japanese mainly use hiragana or kanji, while katakana is used to translate a foreign word to Japanese characters. The choice of which type of writing to use depends on a number of factors, including standard conventions, readability, and stylistic choices.

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.

Script usage also reflects grammaticalisation. Japanese has many compound verbs, as in "go and ask" (行って聞く, ittekiku^?), and, as indicated above, in Japanese orthography lexical items are generally written with kanji (here 行く and 聞く), while grammatical items are written with hiragana (as in the connecting て). Compound verbs are thus generally written with a kanji for each constituent verb, but some suffixes have become grammaticalized, and are written in hiragana, such as "try out, see" (〜みる, -miru^?), from "see" (見る, miru^?), as in "try eating (it) and see" (食べてみる, tabetemiru^?).

[edit] Direction of writing

Traditionally, Japanese is written in a format called tategaki. 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. This copies the column order of Chinese.

Modern Japanese also uses another writing format, called yokogaki. This writing format is horizontal and reads from left to right.

[edit] History of the Japanese script

[edit] Importation of kanji

The current Japanese writing system traces its history back to the 4th century, when Chinese characters (kanji) were introduced to Japan through Baekje^[1]. No definitive evidence of any native Japanese writing system that predates the introduction of kanji exists. A variety of supposedly ancient scripts, jindai moji (also kamiyo moji, 神代文字, lit. "writing of the gods' age") surfaced during the 1930s following the rise of Japanese nationalism–some pictographic, some runic in appearance, and some very close to hangul. Examples can be found on the Internet.[1])

Initially, Chinese characters were not used for writing Japanese; literacy meant fluency in Classical Chinese, not the vernacular. Eventually a system called kanbun (漢文) developed, which, along with kanji and something very similar to Chinese grammar, employed diacritics to hint at the Japanese translation. The earliest written history of Japan, the Kojiki (古事記), 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.

[edit] 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. The modern kana, namely hiragana and katakana, 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 pronunciation similar to the original Chinese. This Chinese-derived reading is known as on-yomi (音読み), and this vocabulary as a whole is referred to as Sino-Japanese in English and kango 漢語 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 kun-yomi (訓読み). A kanji may have none, one, or several on-yomi and kun-yomi. Okurigana 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 行 is read i as the first syllable of iku (行く) 'to go', okona as the first three syllables of okonau (行う, "to carry out"), gyō in the compound word gyōretsu (行列, "line" or "procession"), kō in the word ginkō (銀行, "bank"), and an in the word andon (行灯, "lantern").

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.

[edit] Script reforms

[edit] 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 new words; both borrowed from other languages or newly coined, and the ultimate success of movements such as the influential 言文一致 (genbun'itchi) 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 1800s 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 romaji. This period saw Western-style punctuation marks introduced into Japanese writing (Twine, 1991).

In 1900, the Education Ministry introduced three reforms aimed at improving the education in Japanese writing:

• standardization of the hiragana script, eliminating the range of hentaigana (変体仮名) 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, to the extent that it was withdrawn in 1908 (Seeley, 1990).

[edit] Pre-World War II

The partial failure of the 1900 reforms 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.

[edit] 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 conservatives 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 (現代仮名遣い gendaikanazukai), replacing the old 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);
• and simplifications of various complex kanji letter-forms (shinjitai).

At one stage an advisor in the Occupation administration proposed a wholesale conversion to rōmaji; however it was not endorsed by other specialists and did not proceed. (Unger, 1996)

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 read 駅京東).

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) 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 jinmeiyō kanji, maintained by the Ministry of Justice, was significantly enlarged.

[edit] Nuances

Kanji compounds can be 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 繋がって or つながって.

Signs sometimes drop the hiragana endings from the kanji for brevity.

The Japanese writing system allows for transmitting information that is usually communicated in other languages by using different words or by adding extra descriptive words. For example, writing a word in katakana may give it a modern or 'hip' flair. Some words are colloquially written in hiragana and writing them in kanji might give them a more formal tone.

[edit] Romanization

There are a number of methods of rendering Japanese in Roman letters. The Hepburn method of romanization, designed for English speakers, is a de facto standard widely used inside and outside Japan. The Kunrei-shiki system has a better correspondence with kana, making it easier for the Japanese themselves to learn; it is officially sanctioned 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, JSL, and Wāpuro.

[edit] Lettering styles

• Shodō
• Edomoji
• Minchō
• East Asian gothic typeface

[edit] Variant writing systems

• Gyaru moji
• Hentaigana
• Man'yōgana

[edit] See also

• Chinese writing system
• Genkō yōshi
• Iteration mark about Japanese repetition marks.
• Japanese typographic symbols about non-kana, non-kanji symbols.
• Jindai moji
• Siddham

[edit] References

1. ^ "Korean Buddhism Basis of Japanese Buddhism," Seoul Times, June 18, 2006; "Buddhist Art of Korea & Japan," Asia Society Museum; "Kanji," JapanGuide.com; "Pottery," MSN Encarta; "History of Japan," JapanVisitor.com. Archived 2009-10-31.

• Gottlieb, Nanette (1996). Kanji Politics: Language Policy and Japanese Script. Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7103-0512-5. 
• Twine, Nanette (1991). Language and the Modern State: The Reform of Written Japanese. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-00990-1. 
• 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. 
• Habein, Yaeko Sato (1984). The History of the Japanese Written Language. University of Tokyo Press. ISBN 0-86008-347-0. 
• Unger, J. Marshall (1996). Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan: Reading Between the Lines. OUP. ISBN 0-19-510166-9. 

[edit] 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
• How to prepare any Linux distribution for the Japanese language, by Manfred Schulenburg.