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Thirty-Third Edition - The Japanese character system Reading and writing text in a foreign script is a challenge, but if the language of choice is Japanese, it is particularly challenging, because the reader could find several different scripts all in the same page. Japanese uses a number of scripts:
Kanji: Chinese characters, Japanese Script Japanese script combines two major character systems: Kanji, and Kana (which includes Hiragana and Katakana). Kana – The Phonetic Alphabet The kana phonetic alphabet includes up to 48 hiragana and katakana characters. These characters represent sounds, such as the English “oh” and “shi” sounds. With the addition of diacritical marks, like the Spanish tilde (˜), their number increases to 71. However, this is not enough to build an entire vocabulary, so most Japanese writing also contains kanji characters. Kanji – The Chinese Script To the untrained eye, the difference between Japanese and Chinese characters may be undistinguishable; but although the Japanese adopted the kanji pictographic system that originated in China more than 2500 years ago, the Japanese character system is very different from the Chinese in its present form. The Chinese script that the Japanese adopted at the close of the sixth century, was pictorial in origin. The first kanji characters were pictographs, or sketches of material objects which they represented sun(日), moon (月), tree(木), horse(馬), eye (目), woman (女), fire(火).The characters have evolved so significantly that it now requires some imagination to be able to visualize the picture from which they evolved. (Please refer to the Ninth Edition of the Global Advisor Newsletter “The Evolution of Kanji characters" for illustrations.) Included in the pictorial category are characters that represent a symbol, such as the character for one (一),which some say represents a finger, but others see it as a single stroke, representing a single unit. Other kanji characters are classified as ideographs, or representations of objects or concepts that suggest what the picture is supposed to represent. For example, the characters for up, upper or on top of (上) and for down, or go down (下) Note that the horizontal bar appears at the top and bottom of each of these characters respectively. Another example is the character for book, important (本), based on the character for tree (木) to which a symbol that points to the root of the tree, its most important part, has been added . Some kanji characters are aggregates, i.e., they were created by combining simple elements that are often characters themselves. For example, the character for ocean, sea ( 海) is a combination of the characters for water (シ) and all, every (毎), symbolizing that all water flows to the ocean, or sea. Another example is the character for Fall (秋), that combines the characters for wheat, grain plants (禾) and fire(火), because grain plants turn to the color of fire in the Fall. By combining the characters for heart (心) and Fall, (秋) you have the character for melancholy, sadness (愁), because Fall is considered the season for love, and lovers are vulnerable to unrequited love and heartbreak, and thus to melancholy or sadness. About 8% of kanji characters fall under these three categories (pictographs, ideographs and aggregates). On the other hand, 85% percent of Kanji characters are classified as phonetic ideographs, i.e., the combination of a semantic and a phonetic element. An example of this is the character for school (学校), pronounced GAKKO, and “校” which combines the character for wood (木), representing what school buildings were made of, and the character for exchanging ideas, mingling with different people that also represents the sound KOU. Japanese script also uses phonetic loan characters, where the sound and the character are used to represent names of countries, such as America, pronounced MEI and represented by the borrowed Kanji character for rice(米). France is pronounced FUTSU and represented with the Kanji character for Buddha (仏), and England is pronounced EI and represented by the Kanji character for excellence (英). Kokuji' Finally, there are characters that the Japanese referred to as kokuji'. The literal translation of kokuji’ is national characters, because these characters were invented in Japan, rather than imported from China. Examples are the characters used to write the verbs `hataraku' and `komu'. Some of these Japanese inventions, like the character for `hataraku', have actually been exported to Chinese, but others have remained strictly Japanese. Okurigana The combination of kanji with hiragana. In this script, the kanji character is phonetic. For example hataraku (働く) where the first character represents the meaning of this word (to work) and the okurigana character (く) completes the character and makes it a Japanese character. Furigana This script consists of small kana characters (hiragana, or occasionally katakana) added to Kanji characters to assist with their proper pronunciation. For example: 漢字のフリガナの例 Furigana characters are commonly found in books for Japanese children, who are still leaning their Kanji characters, but they are also found next to the most difficult characters in the books for high-school students, who are expected to be familiar with the simpler Kanji characters. Furigana characters are also frequently added to the kanji characters representing proper names, because their pronunciation is often challenging, even for native Japanese readers. A Japanese student is expected to know 881 kanji characters at the end of the sixth grade and 2000 upon graduation from high-school. On the average, a college graduate can read about 3400 characters. Romaji Consists of Roman alphabet letters that are used to write, for example, names of foreign names, like names of U.S. companieslike "IBM", "Dell", "Microsoft", etc. Another example of the use of romaji is the term for "electronic" in the term e-mail, that is represented with the Romaji character “E”, as in (Eメール). The spoken language Japanese contains fewer sounds than English. Each syllable has the same pronunciation and stress. The pitch often changes the meaning of a word. Therefore, careful listening is required for proper comprehension. Some words, particularly those of foreign origin, cannot be reproduced identically in Japanese. For example, phonetically, California sounds like Kariforunia, Maryland, like Meriiando, violin, like vaiorin and beef steak as biifusuteeki. Double-byte In computer circles, you will hear Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese (CJKV) referred to as double-byte character languages. The processing of languages like English is based on one byte to one character, and it was necessary to overcome this paradigm in order to develop systems that could handle CJKV, where characters are represented by more than a single byte (more than 8 bits). The Japanese Standards Association (JSA), Japan’s counterpart to ANSI, the American National Standards Institute, has identified 3418 primary kanji characters and 3384 secondary kanji characters Secondary kanji include obsolete or historical characters, such as proper names. In the beginning, Japanese computers were limited to using kana, which seriously handicapped ordinary textual applications. In the 1960’s IBM developed the Japanese answer to ASCII in a kanji code, an extension of EBCDIC (Extended binary-coded Decimal Interchange Code), for Japanese language interfacing with mainframes. Out of this came programming software for small computers. Text processing for double-byte characters’ languages has taken a very big leap since then, but CJKV still requires special handling on computer systems. Japanese Translation Proper translation of Asian languages requires familiarity with the culture as well as with the subject matter. Software and website localization in Asian languages presents the additional challenge of the special handling of double-byte languages to ensure proper function and display. InterSol, Inc. offers clients the knowledge and experience necessary to ensure the successful completion of CJKV projects. Please contact us for more information. References: The following references were consulted during the writing of this newsletter:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ealac/gradconf/abstracts96/16writing.html |
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