Kanji

Kanji (literally characters from Han China ) are Chinese characters used in Japanese . Chinese characters (漢字) are called hanzi in Chinese, hanja orhanmun(漢文) in Korean, and hán tư, chu-nom (字喃)or chữ-nho (字儒) in Vietnamese, and are, or have been, used in allfour languages (they are no longer used in Vietnamese). Kanji are one of the three character sets used in the Japanese writingsystem (the other two being hiragana and katakana ). The word kanji is romanized as kanzi in the kunrei-shiki romanization system, but in practice this romanization is very rarely encountered.

History of Chinese characters and kanji

Main article: Chinese characters

Chinese is one of the world's oldest written languages, and Chinese characters originate in the inscriptions carved on oracle bones over 3000 years ago. Over time these were standardised and, insome cases, simplified, until they formed a unified system of writing mutually intelligible across all dialects of Chinese.

There is some disagreement about the beginning of Chinese character use in Japan, but it is generally accepted that Buddhistmonks brought Chinese texts back to Japan in about the 5th century, and these were read in the Chinese language. Over time, asystem of reading or understanding Chinese texts in Japanese developed; a system of special marks was employed which allowedspeakers of Japanese to read the Chinese characters in accordance with the rules of Japanese grammar.

Japanese had no written form, and gradually Chinese characters, known in Japan as kanji, began to be used to write inJapanese. Only men learned these characters, which eventually led to the development of hiragana as a writing system forwomen.

As the Japanese system of writing matured and expanded, the Japanese developed unique ways of using kanji. Kanji began to beused to write certain parts of speech, such as nouns, adjectives and verbs, while kana were used to write verb endings, uniquelyJapanese words, and foreign words (this usage developed much later; originally foreign words were all written phonetically usingkanji).

Kanji versus Chinese characters

While some kanji and Chinese hanzi are mutually readable, many more are not. In addition to characters that have differentmeanings in Japanese, and characters that have identical meanings but are written differently, there are also characters peculiarto Japanese known as kokuji . As well, there are characters that are not usedin Japanese, and also characters that are only used phonetically in Japanese (当て字 ateji). It is therefore not always possible to ascertain the meaning of a kanjifrom its Chinese meaning, and vice versa.

Characteristics and use of kanji

Unlike the kana , which are phonetic syllables with no intrinsic meaning, kanji are logographs (also called logograms , pictograms , pictographs or glyphs ),meaning "symbols used to represent entire words," or ideograms which representabstract concepts, such as "up" or "down".

Kanji are typically more complex than kana, have more strokes , and have(unlike Chinese characters used in China ), different pronunciations ("readings")depending on how they are combined with other kanji and kana .

A kanji will often have its pronunciation for the given context spelled out in ruby characters known as " furigana ," which are small hiragana written above the character (those printed to the side are called kumimoji ). This is especially true in texts forchildren or foreign learners and manga , or for characters not included in the essentialkanji set (see below), or for rare or unusual characters or readings.

Kanji have two main pronunciations, referred to as "readings": on readings (音読み or on-yomi ) and kun readings(訓読み or kun-yomi ).On readings are derived from the original Chinese pronunciations of the character, and are typically used when a kanjiis part of a compound. Kun readings are uniquely Japanese readings mostly used to read single kanji, either as completenouns or as adjective and verb stems. Most kanji have at least one on-reading and one kun-reading each. Kanjialso have a third, lesser-known reading called nanori reading, mostly used for people's names.

There are exceptions to these rules. Many kanji have no kun-reading and a few have no on-reading. Some usekun-readings, not on-readings, to make compounds.

Often a kanji will be used for the root of a verb, with the conjugation written in hiragana (in this usage the extra hiragana are called okurigana ). When kanji characters are not followed by hiragana they are often grouped in twos and are pronounced in the on reading. The word"kanji"(漢字) is a perfect example of this. Its pronunciation is derived from the Chinese word "hanzi".

Japanese prefers to use the ideographiciteration mark (々) to indicate a plural meaning (pronounced as though the kanjiwas written twice in a row), whereas Chinese may reuse the first character, or does not indicate plural at all (although theChinese use is not limited to that of indicating plurality; it is often used in for the purpose of indicating a repetition of aprevious character or a group of characters).

The "essential kanji"

In 1946 the Japanese government, seeking to simplify kanji in literature and periodicals, created a list of 1850 "daily usekanji" (tōyō kanji 当用漢字). This list of kanji wasexpanded to 1945 characters in 1981 and called the jōyō kanji (常用漢字). Characters that were culled from daily usage were replaced by combinations of thesimpler jōyō kanji characters.

These changes were not entirely popular because, for example, some easily written Kanji were omitted, and some commonly usedkanji compound words were now to be partially written in hiragana.

The name kanji

There are approximately 2232 "name kanji" (the jinmeiyō kanji 人名用漢字) used in personaland geographical names, with plans to increase this list by 578 kanji in the near future. This would be the largest increasesince World War II .

This plan has not been without controversy, however. For example, the Chinese characters for "cancer," "hemorrhoids," "corpse"and "excrement," as well as parts of compound words (words created from two or more Chinese characters) meaning "curse,""prostitute," and "rape," are among the proposed additions to the list. This is because no measures were taken to determine theappropriateness of the kanji proposed, with the committee deciding that parents could make such decisions themselves. However,the government will seek input from the public before approving the list.

The expansion is likely to go ahead as most Japanese support it, citing the recent trend of creating new names using unusualor heretofore unused combinations of characters which are extremely difficult to read; they argue that if the number of availablecharacters increases, so will the number of options. Others see the inevitable increase in learning of characters as a positivething.

Others support the increase in the number of approved characters, but argue for the removal of controversial characters fromthe list. Such a move may be likely; in 1993 two parents tried to name their child "Akuma" (devil); they were refused.

In theory, only given names will be affected by the change as fewer characters were permitted for use in names in the past. Itremains to be seen whether it will be legally permissible to use the new characters in family names -- potentially creating neverbefore seen names -- by way of a legal change of name.

Related topics

• Chinese character
• Hanja
• Han unification
• Kanji Reference Index

References

• Hannas, William. C. 1997. Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 082481892X (paperback); ISBN 0824818423 (hardcover)
• DeFrancis, John. 1990. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0824810686

External links

• The JLPT Kanji Project lists the full Jouyou kanji required for the Japanese LanguageProficiency Test