Japanese writing system

This article describes the modern writing system and its history. For an overview of the entire language, see Japanese language.
Japanese
Heibon-pp.10-11.jpg
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.
Japanese writing Japanese writing

Kanji

Kana

Uses

Rōmaji

The modern Japanese writing system uses three main scripts:

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

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, literally meaning "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

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 of the English "on" and "to"). Foreign borrowings are normally spelled in katakana.

Kanji (漢字?) are used to write the following:

Hiragana (平仮名?) are used to write the following:

Katakana (片仮名?) are used to write the following:

The Latin alphabet, and its utilization in Japanese called rōmaji (ローマ字?), is used to write the following:

Hentaigana (変体仮名?), 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:

Choice

Japanese mainly use hiragana or kanji, while katakana is used to transliterate 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?).

Direction of writing

Traditionally, Japanese is written in a format called tategaki (縦書き?). 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 (横書き?). This writing format is horizontal and reads from left to right.

A book printed in tategaki opens from what a Westerner would call the back, while a book printed in yokogaki opens from what traditionally in Japan would have been considered the back.

History of the Japanese script

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 including jindai moji (神代文字?, "scripts of the age of the gods"), also read as kamiyo moji, surfaced during the 1930s following the rise of Japanese nationalism—some pictographic, some runic in appearance, and some very close to hangul.

Initially Chinese characters were not used for writing Japanese, as 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.

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.

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 new words; both borrowed from other languages or newly coined, and the ultimate success of movements such as the influential genbun'itchi (言文一致?) 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 rōmaji. 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:

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).

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.

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:

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 reads 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?)—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 jinmeiyō kanji (人名用漢?), maintained by the Ministry of Justice for use in personal names, was significantly enlarged.

Nuances

For more details on this topic, see furigana.

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 as 繋がって or つながって. The word 接続, meaning "connection", is normally pronounced setsuzoku.

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 English 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.

Romanization

Main article: Romanization of Japanese

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 rōmaji.

Lettering styles

Variant writing systems

See also

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.

External links