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Topic: Japanese writing system

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	Japanese Writing System
		Once the Japanese had an understanding of the Chinese writing system, they attempted to apply it to the writing of the Japanese language.
		At the time, the Chinese writing system of kanji was considered too difficult for women, as it required years of study.
		It is a writing system of aesthetic quality that by itself explains a great deal of the history of the Japanese.
	www.csuchico.edu /~cheinz/syllabi/asst001/fall97/mat-wite.htm (1435 words)

	NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Japanese language (Site not responding. Last check: )
		Japanese writing Kanji Kana Hiragana Katakana Hentaigana ManyÅgana Uses Furigana Okurigana RÅmaji) are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system along with hiragana (å¹³ä»®å;), katakana (ç‰‡ä»®å;), and the Arabic numerals.
		It is an agglutinative language and is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics reflecting the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary to indicate the relative status of speaker, listener and the person mentioned in conversation.
		Early Japanese is known largely on the basis of its state in the 8th century, when the three major works of Old Japanese were compiled; but smaller amounts of material, primarily inscriptional, are older.
	www.nationmaster.com /encyclopedia/Japanese-language (1478 words)

	Japanese Writing System
		The best way to grasp the Japanese writing system is to see it as the outcome of a struggle to adapt Chinese characters to the writing of a completely different language, involving many makeshift strategies and compromises.
		Japanese are aided by the fact that they can fall back on hiragana or katakana to write their language, unlike the Chinese who virtually use only characters.
		The result of the way that the Japanese have borrowed and applied Chinese characters to their own language has given rise to considerable complexity and a heavy burden for the learner of Japanese.
	www.cjvlang.com /Writing/writjpn.html (3704 words)

	Modern Japanese Writing System
		No words end in consonant in spoken Japanese (in final position, is a resonant), but these consonant-ending forms are the longest needed to predict every inflected form of these and the majority of other verbs in the language by rule.
		Therefore, it is anachronistic to use kanji in writing these words so as to imply that they are "still" compounds of kiru and nukeru, miru and naosu, all of which are in productive use as separate verbs in the modern language; the prescriptive writing rule is contradicted by the lexical structure of the modern language.
		Second, many tens of thousands of Japanese have a personal stake in the maintenance of the orthographic status quo; their replacement in the labor force, let alone other areas of daily life, would require at least a generation.
	www.pinyin.info /readings/texts/modern_japanese_writing.html (3602 words)

	Japanese writing systems - UniLang Wiki
		Japanese is customarily written with a mix of three writing systems: Kanji (漢字), Hiragana (平仮名) and Katakana (片仮名).
		Hiragana is used to write the postpositions and grammatical endings in words such as verbs and adjectives.
		This use of the latin alphabet in Japanese should not be confused with romaji, a system of transliteration that allows writing Japanese with latin characters.
	home.unilang.org /wiki3/index.php/Japanese_writing_systems (385 words)

	International JFL Cafe. Japanese language writing system.
		Eventually a system called kanbun (漢文;) was developed, which used both Chinese characters (kanji) and something very similar to Chinese grammar, but often with diacritic marks placed alongside the Chinese text to give hints as to the Japanese equivalent.
		There was still no system for rendering Japanese in written form until the development of manyogana (万葉仮名;), which used Chinese characters for their phonetic value (derived from their Chinese readings) rather than their semantic value.
		The Kunrei-shiki system has a better correspondance with kana, making it easier for the Japanese themselves to learn; it is officially sanctioned by the Ministry of Education, but rarely used outside Japan.
	www.internationaleflcafe.com /japanese-language-writing-system.htm (1530 words)

	Japanese. The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-05
		Japanese appears to be unrelated to any other language; however, some scholars see a kinship with the Korean tongue because the grammars of the two are very similar.
		Extensive use of honorific forms is especially characteristic of Japanese; varying constructions are used to indicate differences in the social status among the individual speaking, the individual addressed, and the individual spoken about.
		A.D., the Japanese borrowed the Chinese writing system of ideographic characters.
	www.bartleby.com /65/ja/Japanese.html (494 words)

	Japanese language history Japanese Nihongo japanese Writing system japanese spoken in
		It is considered an agglutinative language and is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics reflecting the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary which indicate the relative status of speaker and listener.
		Japanese is written with a mix of Chinese characters (kanji) and a modified syllabary, kana, also originally based on Chinese characters.
		Modern Japanese is written in a mixture of three main syllabaries: kanji, characters of Chinese origin used to represent both Chinese loanwords into Japanese and a number of native Japanese morphemes; and two syllabaries: hiragana and katakana.
	www.snrc.co.in /Japanese_Language.html (571 words)

	Highbeam Encyclopedia - Search Results for Japanese
		System of modified Chinese characters used for writing the Japanese language.
		The Japanese developed a mixed system, partly logographic (based on the Chinese writing system) and partly syllabic.
		Japanese come to town; American vendors may lack the ammunition to win the shootout.
	www.encyclopedia.com /SearchResults.aspx?Q=Japanese&StartAt=1 (554 words)

	Ancient Scripts: Japanese
		However, writing in Chinese became very awkward as the grammatical syntax of the Japanese language is considerably different from Chinese.
		This means that the system was ambiguous, as it's hard to tell whether a character is to be interpreted as a logogram or a syllabogram.
		Also, to write palatal sounds like /kyo/ in Kyoto, the convention is to use the -i sign with the desired consonant, followed by a sign from the /y/ series.
	www.ancientscripts.com /japanese.html (789 words)

	International JFL Cafe. Japanese language writing system.
		Eventually a system called kanbun (漢文;) was developed, which used both Chinese characters (kanji) and something very similar to Chinese grammar, but often with diacritic marks placed alongside the Chinese text to give hints as to the Japanese equivalent.
		There was still no system for rendering Japanese in written form until the development of manyogana (万葉仮名;), which used Chinese characters for their phonetic value (derived from their Chinese readings) rather than their semantic value.
		The Kunrei-shiki system has a better correspondance with kana, making it easier for the Japanese themselves to learn; it is officially sanctioned by the Ministry of Education, but rarely used outside Japan.
	internationaleflcafe.com /japanese-language-writing-system.htm (1530 words)

	Outline of the Japanese Writing System
		Although all the principal writing systems of the world began with pictures, these were in almost all cases simplified to abstract symbols that were eventually used for their sound values, giving rise to the major alphabet systems of the world.
		Kanji are used to write the core of the Japanese vocabulary.
		The Japanese language is agglutinative; that is, it forms words by putting together basic elements, called morphemes, that retain their original forms and meanings with little change during the combination process.
	www.kanji.org /kanji/japanese/writing/outline.htm (4704 words)

	Japanese Writing
		However, since knowledge of Chinese was limited, the Japanese soon adapted the Chinese style of writing to the Japanese language—by the seventh century AD, the Japanese were writing Japanese using the Chinese style of writing.
		Japanese, however, was an exponentially different language than Chinese —they are not even in the same language family—so the development of Japanese writing involved ingenious but complex reconfigurations of Chinese writing.
		It's use of certain characters to represent syllables (rather than the free-for-all in normal Japanese writing) was known as the Manyo kana, the "Manyoshu borrowed words," and became the basis for formal rules of writing syllables in kana.
	www.wsu.edu:8080 /~dee/ANCJAPAN/WRITING.HTM (938 words)

	The ‘mixed’ Japanese writing system
		is the core of the writing system for adults.
		The Japanese writing system thus has disadvantages that result from its advantages, and other advantages that are linked to its apparent disadvantages, illustrating the problem of orthographic 'best fit' to meet competing demands.
		To foreigners, the Japanese writing system may appear even worse than English, both for learning and for using, as when two Japanese may be unable to give the same verbal translation of an ordinary notice, because the printed words do not carry precise meanings.
	home.vicnet.net.au /~ozideas/writjap.htm (1829 words)

	Japanese writing system - Definition, explanation
		Japanese words that have kanji assigned to them, but which are more commonly written in hiragana, either out of custom or for ease of reading.
		There was still no system for rendering Japanese in written form until the development of man'yōgana; (万葉仮名;), which used Chinese characters for their phonetic value (derived from their Chinese readings) rather than their semantic value.
		One of the less well-known aspects of the modern Japanese writing system is that it allows for transmitting information that is usually communicated in other languages by using different words or by adding extra descriptive words.
	www.calsky.com /lexikon/en/txt/j/ja/japanese_writing_system.php (2079 words)

	Japanese Writing
		Not the least of these challenges was the fact that when writing Japanese characters, you must follow a specific order and direction of the strokes in order to be understood by a native reader of Japanese.
		Several times when trying to communicate through writing, I was met with blank looks of incomprehension, because what to me looked like the character for "water" looked to the average Japanese person like a scribbled mess.
		These two basic writing systems share most rules, but lengthening vowel sounds and making consonant sounds harder are done differently in the two sets.
	members.aol.com /writejapan (958 words)

	Mesopotamia Glossary: Cuneiform
		This complicated writing system dominated Mesopotamia until the century before the birth of Christ; the Persians greatly simplified cuneiform until it represented something closer to an alphabet.
		This writing would be formed by laying the length of the reed along the wet clay and moving the end nearest the hand from one side to another to form the hooks.
		Writing allowed laws to be written and so to assume a static and independent character; history became more detailed and incorporated much more of local cultures' histories.
	www.wsu.edu /~dee/GLOSSARY/CUNEI.HTM (405 words)

	Eri Takase - Japanese Writing - Japanese Calligraphy
		When the Japanese began to adopt the Chinese writing system in the fifth century, the Chinese writing system was already standardized and was twenty centuries old.
		Japanese has far fewer characters (the largest dictionary will have some 10,000 Kanji), however, each character has several different readings and several word combinations simply must be memorized as words.
		Today, however, Kanji and Hiragana are used to write the Japanese language itself and Katakana is mainly used to write foreign words adopted into the Japanese language.
	www.takase.com /Library/Background.htm (916 words)

	Japanese Translation USA - Translate Japanese Translators
		Japanese also shares considerable similarities with the languages of the Ryukyu Islands, within which Okinawa is located, although the Ryukyu languages and Japanese are also mutually unintelligible.
		Another influence of current note is the generation gap that exists relative to Japanese language use-today's younger generation is tending to favor the utilization of more neutral and informal speech, ignoring the importance of the role of honorific and gender-specific speech regarded important in traditional Japanese.
		japanese translation english to japanese translation japanese symbol translation japanese japanese language japanese food japanese culture japanese art japanese anime japanese sword japan japan music tokyo japan japan travel osaka japan kyoto japan kobe japan japan history hiroshima japan weather in japan education in japan japan cars
	www.japanesetranslationusa.com (1373 words)

	Japanese Language
		Japanese is believed to be linked to the Altaic language family, which includes Turkish, Mongolian and other languages, but also shows similarities to Austronesian languages like Polynesian.
		The Japanese writing system consists of three different character sets: Kanji (several thousands of Chinese characters) and Hiragana and Katakana (two syllabaries of 46 characters each; together called Kana).
		Japanese texts can be written in two ways: In Western style, i.e.
	www.japan-guide.com /e/e621.html (367 words)

	Overview of the Japanese Language to Help You Learn Japanese
		Japanese is not known to be directly related to any other language or family of languages.
		Japanese has an extremely complicated writing system, consisting of two sets of phonetic syllabaries called the hiragana and katakana.
		Because of the nature of Japanese culture, which is characterized by a hierarchical system, the Japanese language has evolved to be very complicated.
	www.transparent.com /languagepages/japanese/overview.htm (964 words)

	Simplified Spelling Society : Japanese writing system.
		Following the defeat of 1945, the Japanese nation was receptive to change in various areas relating to daily life, including the writing system.
		It appears that the Japanese themselves probably made the decisions at this time regarding modifications to their writing system, and that such changes were not imposed on them by the Occupation Forces, as has been suggested.
		Since word-processors for Japanese have encoded in them about 6,300 characters (the characters having been determined in the late 1970s as a Japan Industrial Standard), the use of the word-processor in Japan is something which has major implications for education and script use in society in general.
	www.spellingsociety.org /journals/j19/japanese.php (2136 words)

	Asian Language Terminology
		Even though Chinese sounds only roughly correspond to the English pronunciation of pinyin, the advantage of pinyin is that it closely corresponds to the bopomofo writing system, and that it is the standard phonetic system used in (mainland) China.
		Hiragana is also used to write words not derived from the traditional Chinese characters, or in place of kanji which have been dropped from everyday use, or when the number of kanji in a sentence becomes so great as to be visually unaesthetic, or makes the author seem "bigheaded."
		As Chinese writing evolved, and increasing numbers of Chinese characters were created, the difficulty of cataloging led to the selection and stylizing of approximately 1000 components in frequent use.
	www.aproposinc.com /pages/asiantrm.htm (1566 words)

	Japanese writing reforms
		The Japanese are both pragmatic and nationalistic in their attitude to their writing system.
		The 'hiragana' version is now used as an initial learning system in schools, but it used to be called 'women's hand', because women, without access to classical education, developed it for their own use.
		Interestingly, Japanese were prominent in early development of computer analysis of English language to develop electronic techniques to deal with its structure and present writing system.
	www.vicnet.net.au /~ozideas/wjapref.htm (423 words)

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