Little explanation of the Japanese writing system time ago a friend wanted to make a jersey with the name "Rachel" in Japanese. To make it nice, did some juggling language which required a brief explanation of the system that the Japanese used to write their language. The reproduce below, is full of errors and inaccuracies, but hey! is brief and gives them an idea. The Japanese had no writing system until, in the V century were imported Chinese characters called "Hanzi" in Chinese and "Kanji" in Japanese. Originally, the Japanese nobles written in classical Chinese, but eventually began to write their own language, the Japanese characters using imported.
This, however, represented a serious problem because the Chinese and Japanese are two completely different languages.
The Chinese language consists essentially of one-syllable words that are "stacked" to form compound words, sentences, etc. For example, the verbs do not "blend" as in English, where the whole word changes as spoken in present, past or future, but nothing takes the root of the verb, and they are "sum" the appropriate monosyllable.
In such a system, it makes sense to assign a "drawing" each monosyllable, and simply write irlos gathering. So each "concept" was given a drawing, and that's what the Chinese writing system. Today there are about 5,000 commonly used characters, each representing a basic concept. To form more complex words, simply gather the appropriate characteristics, for example, "bicycle" is written 自行车, and three characters respectively stand for "self", "go" and "vehicle." This type of writing systems are called "logographic" because they consist of logograms, ie symbols that represent words or concepts, in contrast to the phonetic systems, like ours, composed of phonograms, ie symbols represent sounds.
other hand, Japanese is completely different. As in English, there is a core set of "blocks" that help to form words, but the vocabulary is very different origins and its etymology is unclear. As in English, the verbs are conjugated, and different groups of verbs are different conjugation rules. In short, imagine writing our language using a purely logographic: it would be very complicated.
To overcome this difficulty, the Japanese developed, based on certain basic strokes of Chinese characters, two primers called "hiragana" and "katakana". A syllabary is a set of phonograms in which each represent a syllable, which comes very well into Japanese because it only has 46 syllables. In contrast, the English will have around 100 or so.
Any Japanese word can be written using only hiragana and katakana. For example, children's books are written completely in these primers, which are the first to learn in school. However, the Japanese use a combination of the kanji (Chinese characters), hiragana, katakana, and occasionally Western letters to write their language.
How it works The Japanese language consists of words purely Japanese words of Chinese origin adapted to the local pronunciation, words invented in Japan, "Chinese style" and words "borrowed" from other languages, mainly English. In very general terms, and with many exceptions, are written as follows:
- purely Japanese words: is generally used kanji (Chinese character) to represent equivalent the first syllables of words, and hiragana for acomplete. Example: 早い = (has) i = early. This "reading" of the kanji (in this case, "there") is called "Kunyomi" or "Japanese reading." There are some Japanese words that do not have a kanji equivalent, in these cases is written the word "sounds like" in hiragana.
- words of Chinese origin: Usually it is "composite" of several kanji. Each kanji is read using an "adaptation" to the Japanese, often wrong, too far or archaic, its original Chinese pronunciation. For example, 自 転 车 = (ji) (I-n) (sha) = bicycle. In this "reading" is called "konyomi" or "reading China ". It should be noted that these words are taken from the Chinese over several centuries, so it may or may not coincide with current Chinese words, in addition to the" adaptation "of the hundreds of possible syllables in Chinese to the limited Japanese sounds make the pronunciation is completely different.
- words invented in Japan, "Chinese style": It is "compound" formed by several kanji, invented in Japan, "combining" kanji with its "Chinese sound. It As written the words of Chinese origin.
- words "borrowed": For historical reasons, a large part of Japanese vocabulary to describe objects and modern concepts Western or English has been acquired, and to a lesser extent in other languages. An example would アイスクリーム = aiskurimu = ice cream (ice cream), but also most of the names of countries, places in the West, philosophical or religious doctrines, etc. These names are written using a parallel to the hiragana syllabary called katakana. The "adaptation" to the Japanese sounds makes many words are unrecognizable, in addition to that, on many occasions, the Japanese word meaning only corresponds to a specific English equivalents that can be very broad sense.
Why complicate worth so much? I venture two reasons: The "composite", both Chinese invented in Japan, are essential for the language, and allows coining words to describe new objects or phenomena without recourse all the time to import English words. The second reason is that by having so few sounds, Japanese is a language full of homophones: words that sound exactly alike but have different meanings. For example, there are about 20 words that read "Jisei." If the Japanese words were written "as a sound", the 20 different words as well be written. By using logograms to write these words, it is unclear what a homophone is talking (or not, in Japanese poetry, it is common for the author to write some words "sound like", without using kanji, to leave open the exact interpretation.)
