Как пишутся слова на японском

Об этой статье

Была ли эта статья полезной?

Японский язык: хирагана, каткана, иероглифы кандзи. Наша статья расскажет про японское письмо и подскажет начинающим, как выучить японские иероглифы и азбуки.

Konnichiwa, дорогие друзья! Начиная изучение японского языка, вы сразу сталкиваетесь с двумя слоговыми азбуками и иероглифами. Давайте разберем, что же такое катакана и хирагана, как они связаны с кандзи, откуда все они появились и чем различаются.

В японском языке существует три системы письменности. Многие в начале изучения допускают большую ошибку, называя алфавиты иероглифами, хотя на самом деле это совсем разные вещи.

Исторически так сложилось, что в Японии используют две слоговые азбуки: хирагану и катакану. Они сосуществуют с иероглифами, которые по-японски называются кандзи.

Несколько тысяч лет назад у японцев был устный язык, но совсем не было письменности. Чтобы это исправить они позаимствовали систему письма у соседней страны — Китая.

Китайские иероглифы — это идеограммы, указывающие на значение слова. Фонетически каждый из них обозначает слог. Японцы же решили использовать их звучание без привязки к смыслу. Иными словами, японские слова начали записывать иероглифами, подходящими по фонетическому звучанию. Позднее буддийскими монахами были придуманы сами азбуки как способ упрощенного чтения и написания кандзи.

Японские азбуки (и письмо в целом) разделялись по гендерному принципу. Изучение китайских букв было доступно очень ограниченной части мужского населения. Хираганой пользовались преимущественно женщины, катаканой в основном — мужчины. Они между собой и отличаются тем, что у первой азбуки буквы с плавными очертаниями, а у второй они, наоборот, более угловатые.

Несмотря на то, что хирагана считалась женской азбукой, ее изучали далеко не все женщины, а только особы, приближенные к императорскому двору или из высшего общества. Катакана же — это азбука, которой пользовались мужчины в качестве скорописи, а позднее записывали ей служебные части слов.

Слоговые азбуки

Теперь мы рассмотрим, где и когда используются эти алфавиты. Называется японская слоговая азбука 4-мя буквами: кана. Она же, в свою очередь, разделяется на два вида. Структура каны отличается тем, что, если в русском азбука — это буквы, то в японском — слоги. Каждый отдельный слог называется мора.

В таблице ниже представлена хирагана. Ее сразу можно определить по мягкому написанию слогов, выделяющихся своими плавными изгибами. Используется она для записи слов японского происхождения, обозначения различных грамматических частиц, предлогов и изменяемых окончаний.

Как мы видим, у второй азбуки написание букв более угловатое. В современном японском катакана применяется в заимствованных словах, или гайрайго. Также она используется для записи иностранных имен и географических названий мест, городов, рек и т.д.

Иногда этой же азбукой пишутся некоторые японские слова, но делается это только ради моды или для того, чтобы акцентировать внимание на чем-то. В европейских языках для этого служит курсив, подчеркивание и жирное выделение.

Так, например, если хотят выделить слово, в рекламе или просто в статье, то применяется катакана. Это делается от того, что, как правило, иероглифы выделять очень сложно или практически невозможно.

В таблицах представлены 46 основных слогов японских азбук. Также есть еще и дополнительные моры, образующиеся при помощи разных приемов, которые мы подробно разобрали в статье, посвященной различиям хираганы и катаканы.

Наша школа хочет вам помочь скорее научиться читать и писать по-японски! У нас есть для вас два замечательных недельных курса по хирагане и катакане.

Японские иероглифы кандзи

Сейчас кандзи используются при записи основ слов. Поэтому так важно знать все три вида письменности, чтобы пользоваться языком в полной мере. 

Не стоит забывать, что кандзи просто пишутся по-другому, а звуки такие же, как в двух других азбуках.

Японские иероглифы для начинающих кажутся непосильной задачей. Во-первых, из-за их количества, ведь их больше 2 тысяч. Во-вторых, из-за сложности прочтения. Поэтому в отличие от хираганы и катаканы выучить кандзи японские будет сложнее.

Каждый иероглиф имеет одно или несколько прочтений: онъёми, или японская интерпретация китайского произношения иероглифа, и кунъёми, основанное на произношении исконно японских слов. То, как будет читаться кандзи, зависит от контекста в котором он находится: от сочетания с другими кандзи или его места в предложении.

Однако есть много вещей, которые помогут в изучении. Например, порядок штрихов. Возможно, вы уже знаете, что кандзи пишутся в определенной последовательности, которую очень важно запомнить. Не только для того, чтобы было легче различать написанные от руки знаки, но и потому что это поможет при их заучивании.

Иероглифы лучше учить последовательно. В Японии для этого существует целая система, которая называется кёику. В нее входят кандзи, которые преподают детям в начальной школе. Для каждого года обучения есть отдельный список. Например, таблица кандзи снизу соответствует первому классу. Это основные японские иероглифы для начинающих с переводом, которые необходимо знать для дальнейшего изучения языка.

Как выучить японские иероглифы?

Именно иероглифы пугают новичков в японском. Но выучить их определенно возможно. Это даже не так сложно, как кажется! Однако для этого потребуется какое-то время. Не стоит торопиться и пытаться запомнить сотни кандзи за один день.

Изучать один за другим японский кандзи для начинающих — плохая идея.  В отличие от двух других систем письменности, эти символы лучше учить сразу в контексте. То есть надо сосредоточить внимание не просто на одном иероглифе, а на целых словах, где он используется. 

Разберем это на примере одних из самых простых иероглифов японских. Возьмем два кандзи из таблицы выше:

1. 日 — день/солнце. Онъёми: «ничи», кунъёми: «хи», «ка». 
2. 本 — основа/книга. Онъёми: «хон», кунъёми: «мото». 

Вместо того, чтобы заучивать каждое звучание по отдельности легче выучить слово, где используются эти кандзи: 日本 (нихон) — Япония.

Пытаться запоминать одиночные прочтения может оказаться неэффективным по нескольким причинам:

1. Вы не будете знать, в каких случаях какой вариант используется. Например, выучив онъёми и кунъёми 本, вы все еще не будете знать, как читается слово 大本 (о:мото) — корень.
2. Вы их быстро забудете.

Еще один хороший способ, как запомнить японские иероглифы — это мнемоника. С помощью ассоциаций можно выучить не только сами кандзи, но и полные слова. Например, та же “Япония” в Западной культуре известна как “Страна Восходящего Солнца”. Это выражение и является мнемоникой для запоминания 日本:  日 (солнце) + 本 (основа) = “основа солнца” или “там, где начинается солнце”.

Это наиболее эффективные варианты, чтобы учить японские иероглифы кандзи. В учебниках по изучению кандзи всегда даются примеры слов для каждого символа. Также в них часто можно найти картинки, которые помогают выстроить ассоциацию между иероглифом и его значением.

Если не повторять иероглифы, то они быстро забудутся. Поэтому каждый день выделяйте хотя бы 30 минут для их повторения.

Хирагана, катакана, кандзи — японский язык в целом — вещи непростые, но интересные. Каждый элемент — это отдельный необычный мир, исследовать который можно разными способами.

Итак, сегодня мы выяснили, что японские буквы были скопированы с китайских иероглифов, а затем развились в два отдельных алфавита. Хирагана и катакана являются базовыми системами письменности, выучив которые можно будет приступать к изучению кандзи.

Теперь, если в сканвордах встретите вопросы наподобие нижеперечисленных, то точно будете знать на них ответы:

• угловатая японская азбука (8 букв);
• основная японская азбука (8 букв);
• японская азбука (4 буквы) или раздел японской азбуки (4 буквы);
• японская буква (4 буквы);
• японский иероглиф (5 букв).

Вы же их знаете? Напишите в комментариях!

А что еще интересного знаете о японских слоговых азбуках и иероглифах вы? Также поделитесь своими знаниями в комментариях! До новых встреч!

Последняя и самая известная сторона японской письменности — кандзи.
Кандзи — китайские иероглифы, адаптированные для японского языка.
Большая часть японских слов пишется в кандзи, но звуки те же, что в хирагане и катакане.

Порядок штрихов

С самого начала изучения уделяйте внимание правильному порядку и направлению линий, чтобы избежать вредных привычек.
Часто изучающие не видят смысла в порядке штрихов, если результат тот же.
Но они упускают из виду то, что существуют тысячи символов и не всегда они пишутся так тщательно как выглядят на печати.
Правильный порядок штрихов помогает узнать иероглифы, даже если вы пишите быстро или от руки.

Простейшие символы, называемые радикалами, часто используются как компоненты сложных символов.
Как только вы выучите порядок штрихов радикалов и привыкните к принципу, вы обнаружите, что несложно угадать правильный порядок для большинства кандзи.

Чаще всего штрихи наносятся из левого верхнего угла в правый нижний.
Это означает, что горизонтальные черты обычно рисуют слева направо, а вертикальные — сверху вниз.
В любом случае когда вы сомневаетесь в порядке штрихов, сверьтесь со словарем кандзи.

Кандзи в лексиконе

В современном японском используется немногим более 2 тысяч иероглифов, и запоминание каждого по отдельности не работает так хорошо как с хираганой.

Эффективная стратегия овладения кандзи — изучение с новыми словами с большим контекстом.
Так для закрепления в памяти мы связываем символ с контекстной информацией.
Кандзи используются для представления реальных слов, поэтому сосредоточьтесь на словах и лексике, а не на самих символах.

Вы увидите, как работают кандзи, выучив несколько распространенных иероглифов и слов из данного параграфа.

Чтения кандзи

Первый кандзи, который мы изучим —「人」, иероглиф для понятия «человек».
Это простой символ из двух черт, каждая из которых наносится сверху вниз.
Возможно вы заметили, что символ из шрифта не всегда похож на рукописную версию ниже.
Это еще один важный повод сверяться с порядком штрихов.

	Значение: человек; личность
Кунъёми: ひと
Онъёми: ジン

Кандзи в японском языке имеют одно или несколько чтений, которые делят на две категории: кунъёми (или кун, или кунное чтение) и онъёми (или он, или онное чтение). Кунъёми — японское чтение иероглифа, в то время как онъёми основано на оригинальном китайском произношении.

В основном кунъёми используется для слов из одного символа. В качестве примера — слово со значением «человек»:

人　【ひと】 — человек

Кунъёми также используется для исконно японских слов, включая большинство прилагательных и глаголов.

Онъёми в большинстве случаев используется для слов, пришедших из китайского языка, часто из двух или более кандзи. По этой причине онъёми часто записывается катаканой. Больше примеров последует по мере изучения кандзи. Один очень полезный пример онъёми — присоединение 「人」 к названиям стран для описания национальности.

Примеры:

• アメリカ人　【アメリカ・じん】 — американец
• フランス人　【ふらんす・じん】 — француз

Хотя у большинства иероглифов нет множества кунъёми или онъёми, у наиболее распространенных кандзи, вроде 「人」, много чтений. Здесь я буду приводить только чтения, применимые к изучаемым словам. Изучение чтений без контекста в виде слов создает ненужную путаницу, поэтому я не рекомендую учить все чтения сразу.

Теперь, после знакомства с общей идеей, давайте изучим чуть больше слов и сопутствующие им кандзи. Красные точки на диаграммах порядка черт демонстрируют, где начинается каждый штрих.

1. 日本 【に・ほん】 — Япония
2. 本 【ほん】 — книга

1. 学生 【がく・せい】 — учащийся
2. 先生 【せん・せい】 — учитель

1. 高い 【たか・い】 — высокий; дорогой
2. 学校 【がっ・こう】 — школа
3. 高校 【こう・こう】 — старшая школа (третья ступень обучения, эквивалентна 10–12 классам у нас)

1. 小さい 【ちい・さい】 — маленький
2. 大きい 【おお・きい】 — большой
3. 小学校 【しょう・がっ・こう】 — начальная школа (первая ступень обучения, соответствует 1–6 классам у нас)
4. 中学校 【ちゅう・がっ・こう】 — средняя школа (вторая ступень обучения, 7–9 класс у нас)
5. 大学 【だい・がく】 — колледж; университет
6. 小学生 【しょう・がく・せい】 — учащийся начальной школы
7. 中学生 【ちゅう・がく・せい】 — учащийся средней школы
8. 大学生 【だい・がく・せい】 — студент

1. 国 【くに】 — страна
2. 中国 【ちゅう・ごく】 — Китай
3. 中国人 【ちゅう・ごく・じん】 — китаец

1. 日本語 【に・ほん・ご】 — японский язык
2. 中国語 【ちゅう・ごく・ご】 — китайский язык
3. 英語 【えい・ご】 — английский язык
4. フランス語 【フランス・ご】 — французский язык
5. スペイン語 【スペイン・ご】 — испанский язык

Только с 14 символами мы изучили более 25 слов — от Китая до школьника!
Кандзи обычно воспринимаются как основное препятствие в изучении, но их легко превратить в ценный инструмент, если изучать вместе со словами.

Окуригана и изменение чтений

Вы могли заметить, что некоторые слова оканчиваются хираганой, например 「高い」 или 「大きい」.
Так как это прилагательные, сопровождающая хирагана, называемая окуриганой, нужна для различных преобразований без влияния на кандзи.
Запоминайте, где именно заканчивается кандзи и начинается хирагана.
Не надо писать 「大きい」 как 「大い」.

Вы также могли заметить, что чтения кандзи по отдельности не соответствуют чтениям в некоторых словах.
Например, 「学校」 читается как 「がっこう」, а не 「がくこう」.
Чтения часто так трансформируются для облегчения произношения.

В идеале проверяйте чтение каждого нового для вас слова.
К счастью, с помощью онлайн- и электронных словарей поиск новых кандзи не представляет трудностей.

Руководство по поиску кандзи (англ.)

Разные кандзи для похожих слов

Кандзи часто используется для создания нюансов или придания иного оттенка значению слова.
Для некоторых слов важно использовать правильный кандзи в нужной ситуации.
Например, прилагательное「あつい」 — «горячий» — при описании климата пишут как 「暑い」, а если речь о горячем объекте или человеке —「熱い」.

В других случаях, хотя и применяются кандзи, верные для всех значений выбранного слова, автор вправе выбирать иероглифы с узким значением, соответственно стилю.
В примерах данной книги обычно используются общие и простые кандзи.
Подробности об использовании разных кандзи для одного и того же слова вас ждут в руководстве по изучению слов (англ.).

This article is about the modern writing system and its history. For an overview of the entire language, see Japanese language. For the use of Latin letters to write Japanese, see Romanization of Japanese.

Japanese
Japanese novel using kanji kana majiri bun (text with both kanji and kana), the most general orthography for modern Japanese. Ruby characters (or furigana) are also used for kanji words (in modern publications these would generally be omitted for well-known kanji). The text is in the traditional tategaki («vertical writing») style; it is read down the columns and from right to left, like traditional Chinese. Published in 1908.
Script type	mixed logographic (kanji), syllabic (hiragana and katakana)
Time period	4th century AD to present
Direction	When written vertically, Japanese text is written from top to bottom, with multiple columns of text progressing from right to left. When written horizontally, text is almost always written left to right, with multiple rows progressing downward, as in standard English text. In the early to mid-1900s, there were infrequent cases of horizontal text being written right to left, but that style is very rarely seen in modern Japanese writing.[citation needed]
Languages	Japanese language Ryukyuan languages
Related scripts
Parent systems	(See kanji and kana) Japanese
ISO 15924
ISO 15924	Jpan (413), ​Japanese (alias for Han + Hiragana + Katakana)
Unicode
Unicode range	U+4E00–U+9FBF Kanji U+3040–U+309F Hiragana U+30A0–U+30FF Katakana
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalised Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, 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.^[1][2]

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” (和製漢字, wasei kanji; also known as “country’s kanji” 国字, kokuji). 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.^[3] The total number of kanji is well over 50,000, though few if any native speakers know anywhere near this number.^[4]

In modern Japanese, the hiragana and katakana syllabaries each contain 46 basic characters, or 71 including diacritics. With one or two minor exceptions, each different sound in the Japanese language (that is, each different syllable, strictly each mora) 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 graphemes like kanji due to both graphical and computational limitations.^[5]

To a lesser extent, modern written Japanese also uses initialisms from the Latin alphabet, for example in terms such as «BC/AD», «a.m./p.m.», «FBI», and «CD». Romanized Japanese 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[edit]

Kanji[edit]

Kanji (漢字) are logographic characters (based on traditional ones) taken from Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese.

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. 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 words of native Japanese or (historically) Chinese origin, which include the following:

• most nouns, such as 川 (kawa, «river») and 学校 (gakkō, «school»)
• the stems of most verbs and adjectives, such as 見 in 見る (miru, «see») and 白 in 白い (shiroi, «white»)
• the stems of many adverbs, such as 速 in 速く (hayaku, «quickly») and 上手 as in 上手に (jōzu ni, «masterfully»)
• most Japanese personal names and place names, such as 田中 (Tanaka) and 東京 (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 治す when it refers to curing a person, and 直す 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 明日 (ashita, «tomorrow») and 大人 (otona, «adult»).

Unusual or nonstandard kanji readings may be glossed using furigana. Kanji compounds are sometimes 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.

Kana[edit]

Hiragana[edit]

Hiragana (平仮名) 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 (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:

• okurigana (送り仮名)—inflectional endings for adjectives and verbs—such as る in 見る (miru, «see») and い in 白い (shiroi, «white»), and respectively た and かった in their past tense inflections 見た (mita, «saw») and 白かった (shirokatta, «was white»).
• various function words, including most grammatical particles, or postpositions (joshi (助詞))—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).
• Furigana (振り仮名)—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.^[6] For example, the Japanese word kawaii, the Japanese equivalent of «cute», can be written entirely in hiragana as in かわいい, or with kanji as 可愛い.

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 見る (miru, «see») is normally written with the kanji 見 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 みる, as we see also in 食べてみる (tabete miru, «try to eat [it] and see»).

Katakana[edit]

Katakana (片仮名) emerged around the 9th century, in the Heian period, 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.

Katakana is used to write the following:

• transliteration of foreign words and names, such as コンピュータ (konpyūta, «computer») and ロンドン (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.
• commonly used names of animals and plants, such as トカゲ (tokage, «lizard»), ネコ (neko, «cat») and バラ (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 ローソク (rōsoku, «candle»)
• onomatopoeia, such as ワンワン (wan-wan, «woof-woof»), and other sound symbolism
• 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[edit]

The first contact of the Japanese with the Latin alphabet occurred in the 16th century, during the Muromachi period, 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. It was developed around 1548 by a Japanese Catholic named Anjirō.

The Latin alphabet is used to write the following:

• 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
• other Japanized words derived or originated from foreign languages, such as Jリーグ (jei rīgu, «J. League»), Tシャツ (tī shatsu, «T-shirt») or B級グルメ (bī-kyū gurume, «B-rank gourmet [cheap and local cuisines]»)

Arabic numerals[edit]

Arabic numerals (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 first contact being via Portuguese navigators. These numerals did not originate in Europe, as the Portuguese inherited them during the Arab occupation of the Iberian peninsula. See also Japanese numerals.

Hentaigana[edit]

Hentaigana (変体仮名), a set of archaic kana made obsolete by the Meiji reformation, are sometimes used to impart an archaic flavor, like in items of food (esp. soba).

Additional mechanisms[edit]

Jukujikun 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 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[edit]

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):

Tシャツを3枚購入しました。

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:

Tīshatsu o san—mai kōnyū shimashita.

Translated into English, this reads:

I bought 3 T-shirts.

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), 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 女 (woman/female). Another example is 消しゴム (rōmaji: keshigomu) which means «eraser», and uses a kanji, a hiragana, and two katakana characters, in that order.

Statistics[edit]

A statistical analysis of a corpus of the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun from the year 1993 (around 56.6 million tokens) revealed:^[7]

Collation[edit]

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 usually collated using the radical system, though other systems, such as SKIP, also exist.

Direction of writing[edit]

Traditionally, Japanese is written in a format called tategaki (縦書き), 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.

Modern Japanese also uses another writing format, called yokogaki (横書き). 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[edit]

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, あなたはお母さんにそっくりね。 must be mentally divided as あなた　は　お母さん　に　そっくり　 ね。 (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, 愛する, «to love», composed of 愛 (ai, «love») and する (suru, «to do», here a verb-forming suffix), is variously transliterated as aisuru or ai suru.

Words in potentially unfamiliar foreign compounds, normally transliterated in katakana, may be separated by a punctuation mark called a nakaguro (中黒, «middle dot») to aid Japanese readers. For example, ビル・ゲイツ (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[edit]

Importation of kanji[edit]

Japan’s first encounters with Chinese characters may have come as early as the 1st century AD with the King of Na gold seal, said to have been given by Emperor Guangwu of Han in AD 57 to a Japanese emissary.^[8] However, it is unlikely that the Japanese became literate in Chinese writing any earlier than the 4th century AD.^[8]

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[edit]

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. Some scholars claim that man’yōgana originated from Baekje, but this hypothesis is denied by mainstream Japanese scholars.^[9][10] 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 similar pronunciation 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[edit]

Meiji period[edit]

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 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 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.^[11]

In 1900, the Education Ministry introduced three reforms aimed at improving the process of 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, to the extent that it was withdrawn in 1908.^[12]

Pre–World War II[edit]

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 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. 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.^[13]

Post–World War II[edit]

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 traditionalists from control of the educational system, which meant that previously stalled revisions could proceed. The major reforms were:

• gendai kanazukai (現代仮名遣い)—alignment of kana usage with modern pronunciation, 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);
• simplifications of various complex kanji letter-forms shinjitai (新字体).

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.^[14]

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^{[clarification needed]}, 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.^[15]

In 2004, the jinmeiyō kanji (人名用漢字), 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[edit]

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 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.^{[citation needed]} Other systems of romanization include Nihon-shiki, JSL, and Wāpuro rōmaji.

Lettering styles[edit]

• Shodō
• Edomoji
• Minchō
• East Asian sans-serif typeface

Variant writing systems[edit]

• Gyaru-moji
• Hentaigana
• Man’yōgana

See also[edit]

References[edit]

Sources[edit]

• Gottlieb, Nanette (1996). Kanji Politics: Language Policy and Japanese Script. Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7103-0512-5.
• Habein, Yaeko Sato (1984). The History of the Japanese Written Language. University of Tokyo Press. ISBN 0-86008-347-0.
• Miyake, Marc Hideo (2003). Old Japanese: A Phonetic Reconstruction. RoutledgeCurzon. ISBN 0-415-30575-6.
• 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.
• Twine, Nanette (1991). Language and the Modern State: The Reform of Written Japanese. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-00990-1.
• Unger, J. Marshall (1996). Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan: Reading Between the Lines. OUP. ISBN 0-19-510166-9.

External links[edit]

• 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

This article is about the modern writing system and its history. For an overview of the entire language, see Japanese language. For the use of Latin letters to write Japanese, see Romanization of Japanese.

Japanese
Japanese novel using kanji kana majiri bun (text with both kanji and kana), the most general orthography for modern Japanese. Ruby characters (or furigana) are also used for kanji words (in modern publications these would generally be omitted for well-known kanji). The text is in the traditional tategaki («vertical writing») style; it is read down the columns and from right to left, like traditional Chinese. Published in 1908.
Script type	mixed logographic (kanji), syllabic (hiragana and katakana)
Time period	4th century AD to present
Direction	When written vertically, Japanese text is written from top to bottom, with multiple columns of text progressing from right to left. When written horizontally, text is almost always written left to right, with multiple rows progressing downward, as in standard English text. In the early to mid-1900s, there were infrequent cases of horizontal text being written right to left, but that style is very rarely seen in modern Japanese writing.[citation needed]
Languages	Japanese language Ryukyuan languages
Related scripts
Parent systems	(See kanji and kana) Japanese
ISO 15924
ISO 15924	Jpan (413), ​Japanese (alias for Han + Hiragana + Katakana)
Unicode
Unicode range	U+4E00–U+9FBF Kanji U+3040–U+309F Hiragana U+30A0–U+30FF Katakana
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalised Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, 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.^[1][2]

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” (和製漢字, wasei kanji; also known as “country’s kanji” 国字, kokuji). 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.^[3] The total number of kanji is well over 50,000, though few if any native speakers know anywhere near this number.^[4]

In modern Japanese, the hiragana and katakana syllabaries each contain 46 basic characters, or 71 including diacritics. With one or two minor exceptions, each different sound in the Japanese language (that is, each different syllable, strictly each mora) 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 graphemes like kanji due to both graphical and computational limitations.^[5]

To a lesser extent, modern written Japanese also uses initialisms from the Latin alphabet, for example in terms such as «BC/AD», «a.m./p.m.», «FBI», and «CD». Romanized Japanese 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[edit]

Kanji[edit]

Kanji (漢字) are logographic characters (based on traditional ones) taken from Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese.

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. 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 words of native Japanese or (historically) Chinese origin, which include the following:

• most nouns, such as 川 (kawa, «river») and 学校 (gakkō, «school»)
• the stems of most verbs and adjectives, such as 見 in 見る (miru, «see») and 白 in 白い (shiroi, «white»)
• the stems of many adverbs, such as 速 in 速く (hayaku, «quickly») and 上手 as in 上手に (jōzu ni, «masterfully»)
• most Japanese personal names and place names, such as 田中 (Tanaka) and 東京 (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 治す when it refers to curing a person, and 直す 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 明日 (ashita, «tomorrow») and 大人 (otona, «adult»).

Unusual or nonstandard kanji readings may be glossed using furigana. Kanji compounds are sometimes 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.

Kana[edit]

Hiragana[edit]

Hiragana (平仮名) 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 (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:

• okurigana (送り仮名)—inflectional endings for adjectives and verbs—such as る in 見る (miru, «see») and い in 白い (shiroi, «white»), and respectively た and かった in their past tense inflections 見た (mita, «saw») and 白かった (shirokatta, «was white»).
• various function words, including most grammatical particles, or postpositions (joshi (助詞))—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).
• Furigana (振り仮名)—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.^[6] For example, the Japanese word kawaii, the Japanese equivalent of «cute», can be written entirely in hiragana as in かわいい, or with kanji as 可愛い.

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 見る (miru, «see») is normally written with the kanji 見 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 みる, as we see also in 食べてみる (tabete miru, «try to eat [it] and see»).

Katakana[edit]

Katakana (片仮名) emerged around the 9th century, in the Heian period, 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.

Katakana is used to write the following:

• transliteration of foreign words and names, such as コンピュータ (konpyūta, «computer») and ロンドン (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.
• commonly used names of animals and plants, such as トカゲ (tokage, «lizard»), ネコ (neko, «cat») and バラ (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 ローソク (rōsoku, «candle»)
• onomatopoeia, such as ワンワン (wan-wan, «woof-woof»), and other sound symbolism
• 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[edit]

The first contact of the Japanese with the Latin alphabet occurred in the 16th century, during the Muromachi period, 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. It was developed around 1548 by a Japanese Catholic named Anjirō.

The Latin alphabet is used to write the following:

• 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
• other Japanized words derived or originated from foreign languages, such as Jリーグ (jei rīgu, «J. League»), Tシャツ (tī shatsu, «T-shirt») or B級グルメ (bī-kyū gurume, «B-rank gourmet [cheap and local cuisines]»)

Arabic numerals[edit]

Arabic numerals (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 first contact being via Portuguese navigators. These numerals did not originate in Europe, as the Portuguese inherited them during the Arab occupation of the Iberian peninsula. See also Japanese numerals.

Hentaigana[edit]

Hentaigana (変体仮名), a set of archaic kana made obsolete by the Meiji reformation, are sometimes used to impart an archaic flavor, like in items of food (esp. soba).

Additional mechanisms[edit]

Jukujikun 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 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[edit]

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):

Tシャツを3枚購入しました。

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:

Tīshatsu o san—mai kōnyū shimashita.

Translated into English, this reads:

I bought 3 T-shirts.

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), 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 女 (woman/female). Another example is 消しゴム (rōmaji: keshigomu) which means «eraser», and uses a kanji, a hiragana, and two katakana characters, in that order.

Statistics[edit]

A statistical analysis of a corpus of the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun from the year 1993 (around 56.6 million tokens) revealed:^[7]

Collation[edit]

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 usually collated using the radical system, though other systems, such as SKIP, also exist.

Direction of writing[edit]

Traditionally, Japanese is written in a format called tategaki (縦書き), 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.

Modern Japanese also uses another writing format, called yokogaki (横書き). 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[edit]

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, あなたはお母さんにそっくりね。 must be mentally divided as あなた　は　お母さん　に　そっくり　 ね。 (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, 愛する, «to love», composed of 愛 (ai, «love») and する (suru, «to do», here a verb-forming suffix), is variously transliterated as aisuru or ai suru.

Words in potentially unfamiliar foreign compounds, normally transliterated in katakana, may be separated by a punctuation mark called a nakaguro (中黒, «middle dot») to aid Japanese readers. For example, ビル・ゲイツ (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[edit]

Importation of kanji[edit]

Japan’s first encounters with Chinese characters may have come as early as the 1st century AD with the King of Na gold seal, said to have been given by Emperor Guangwu of Han in AD 57 to a Japanese emissary.^[8] However, it is unlikely that the Japanese became literate in Chinese writing any earlier than the 4th century AD.^[8]

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[edit]

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. Some scholars claim that man’yōgana originated from Baekje, but this hypothesis is denied by mainstream Japanese scholars.^[9][10] 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 similar pronunciation 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[edit]

Meiji period[edit]

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 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 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.^[11]

In 1900, the Education Ministry introduced three reforms aimed at improving the process of 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, to the extent that it was withdrawn in 1908.^[12]

Pre–World War II[edit]

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 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. 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.^[13]

Post–World War II[edit]

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 traditionalists from control of the educational system, which meant that previously stalled revisions could proceed. The major reforms were:

• gendai kanazukai (現代仮名遣い)—alignment of kana usage with modern pronunciation, 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);
• simplifications of various complex kanji letter-forms shinjitai (新字体).

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.^[14]

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^{[clarification needed]}, 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.^[15]

In 2004, the jinmeiyō kanji (人名用漢字), 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[edit]

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 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.^{[citation needed]} Other systems of romanization include Nihon-shiki, JSL, and Wāpuro rōmaji.

Lettering styles[edit]

• Shodō
• Edomoji
• Minchō
• East Asian sans-serif typeface

Variant writing systems[edit]

• Gyaru-moji
• Hentaigana
• Man’yōgana

See also[edit]

References[edit]

Sources[edit]

• Gottlieb, Nanette (1996). Kanji Politics: Language Policy and Japanese Script. Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7103-0512-5.
• Habein, Yaeko Sato (1984). The History of the Japanese Written Language. University of Tokyo Press. ISBN 0-86008-347-0.
• Miyake, Marc Hideo (2003). Old Japanese: A Phonetic Reconstruction. RoutledgeCurzon. ISBN 0-415-30575-6.
• 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.
• Twine, Nanette (1991). Language and the Modern State: The Reform of Written Japanese. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-00990-1.
• Unger, J. Marshall (1996). Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan: Reading Between the Lines. OUP. ISBN 0-19-510166-9.

External links[edit]

• 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

И сразу ответ — писать японские слова по-русски следует согласно системе Поливанова, также известной как киридзи.=)

Краткая таблица важных слогов с дополнениями:

Дополнения:

а) На месте буквы «k» в крайней правой колонке может стоять любая другая согласная (это обобщающая колонка). То есть не «Бьякуган», а Бякуган, не «Хьюга», а Хюга.

б) Буква «e» в английском варианте в русском пишется как «э». То есть Temari = Тэмари. Для смягчения можно заменять ее на «е», но это, строго говоря, неверно.

в) Сочетания «nm», «nb» и «np» передаются как «мм», «мб» и «мп» (так они звучат и в японском языке). То есть Enma = Эмма.

г) Буква «i» после гласной («ai», «ui» и т.д.) отображается как «й». Suiton = Суйтон.

д) Сочетания «ou», «uu» и «aa» означают просто долгую гласную. В русском написании вторая буква опускается. То есть не «Гаара» (японцы так не говорят), а Гара. Не «Кидоумару», а Кидомару.

FAQ

1) То есть писать «Какаши» и «Шизуне» — неверно, а надо «Какаси» и «Сидзунэ»? Разве это не просто альтернативные системы транскрипции?

К сожалению, нет. Для русского языка есть только одна система транскрипции — это система Поливанова (см. выше). Система Хэпбёрна (где Kakashi и Shizune) — это система транскрипции

для английского языка

. Так что «Какаши» и «Шизуне» — это просто кальки с английской системы, которая в свою очередь калькировала японские слова.
Для примера: это как если бы какие-нибудь русские слова сначала перевели на иврит, а потом — с иврита на суахили. Были бы получившиеся кальки похожи на оригинал? Вот поэтому правильнее пользоваться системой Поливанова, специально разработанной для русского языка и напрямую транскрибирующей японские слова.

2) А есть какие-то другие способы писать японские слова по-русски?

Нет, увы. Дело в том, что других систем (то есть методов транскрипции с разработанными и утвержденными правилами, которые бы были утверждены в академических источниках) просто нет. И калька с системы для английского языка не является, конечно, системой для языка русского.
А вот в английском языке альтернативные системы есть. Например, система кунрэй, разработанная японскими филологами — там, как и в системе Поливанова, не shi и chi, а si и ti.

3) Однако я смотрю мультфильм и слышу, как персонаж произносит «Какаши», а не Какаси.

Не совсем так. Вы слышите, как он произносит слово, похожее на «Kakashi» — так, как оно звучит в английском языке. Дело в том, что согласный звук в последнем слоге этого слове — это шепелявое мягкое с’, которое в токийском диалекте (который что-то вроде нашего московского говора, на котором говорит все ТВ) звучит зачастую совсем как sh. Однако от этого оно мягким шепелявым с’ быть не перестает — поэтому каждый японец произносит слог «shi» как хочет: то как «си», то как «щи», то вообще как «сы». Поэтому в одном и том же мультфильме может встретиться несколько различных произношений. Именно поэтому споры т.н. «поливановцев» и «хэпбёрновцев» с привлечением источников из анимэ напоминают борьбу Льва и Единорога из «Алисы» Кэррола. Находить в мультике «shi» и «si» можно бесконечно.
Аналога такому звуку нет ни в английском, ни в русском. Поэтому для каждого языка выбран оптимальный вариант: в русском — «с», в английском — «sh» . Какаси и Kakashi. Сочетание «ши» для русского недопустимо — потому что в результате по звучанию получается «шы». Японцы вас не поймут.
Примерно то же касается «Какудзу», «Тёдзи» и прочих спорных слов.

4) А зачем вообще нужны какие-то системы? Пусть каждый пишет так, как ему нравится.

Возьмем для примера правила русского языка. Искусственную языковую норму создают по многим причинам, но в первую очередь — для устранения хаоса и разброда. Слово «корова» каждый, конечно, может писать как угодно. Иван с Поволжья напишет «корова», Коля из Москвы — «карова», а пятилетняя Леночка — «калова». Но для того, чтобы привести всех к единому знаменателю, введена искусственная языковая норма — писать следует «корова». (Сравните с «а мне слышится Какаши».)
То же самое и здесь, с системой Поливанова. Имя «Chouji» один пишет как «Чоджи», второй — как «Чоуджи», третий — как «Тёджи»… И так до бесконечности, вплоть до полного непонимания того, какое слово написано. Поэтому есть правильное написание слова — «Тёдзи» и только «Тёдзи».

5) Я еще послушал и решил, что звучение слога «shi» больше похоже на русское «щи». Может быть, правильнее было бы не «си», а «щи»?

Нет. Дело в том, что «щи» звучит так же, как буквосочетание «sshi» — так что подобное написание только запутает дело. И потом, есть уже утвержденная система.

6) А как быть со словами «иена», «гейша», «Токио», «Иокогама»? Они — тоже неправильные?

Нет, это слова-исключения. Они пришли к нам через английский язык и закрепились настолько давно, что вошли в языковую норму и были утверждены в словарях именно в таком написании. Так что все нормально.
(Хотя, имхо, «гэйся» звучит кавайнее ^__^)

—
Табличка и дополнения взяты с сайта susi.ru