Page 12 - Japanese Character Writing for Dummies

introduced, there was a difficulty. The grammatical structure of Japanese is radically different from
that of Chinese. In addition, phonologically speaking, Japanese is a syllabic language in which one
syllable corresponds to one sound that does not indicate any meaning on its own. In the Chinese
language, each character is associated with a single sound and a single meaning. So people needed
to figure out how Japan’s indigenous language could adopt this writing system. As you can imag-
ine, it was not an easy task!

Initially, the Chinese texts, mainly Buddhist, were studied and assimilated as such. Any well-
trained scholars at that time knew how to write and read in classical Chinese, which was called
kanbun (Han style text). Reading this kind of text requires some intellectual effort. Diacritical signs
were invented to indicate the order in which one had to read the kanji so that the Chinese text
would conform to Japanese grammatical structure.

As far as pronunciation was concerned, attempts were made to reproduce the Chinese sounds with
varying degrees of success, resulting in the approximation of the original sounds. At the same
time, kanji was applied to write original Japanese words based on the meanings, not the Chinese
pronunciations, of the kanji. This explains why most kanji have 音 読 み onyomi (an approxima-
tion of the Chinese pronunciation), and 訓 読 み kunyomi (the original Japanese pronunciation). For
example, the kanji, 人 (person), has three different pronunciations in Japanese: JIN, NIN, and hito.

Creating writing scripts better suited

to Japanese — hiragana and katakana

By the end of the Heian period (794–1185), Japanese people had invented two other writing scripts
that fit the Japanese language better. These two writing scripts are collectively called kana and are
derived from kanji. The original forms of kana were initially used to indicate the pronunciation of
Chinese words.

These two kana scripts are called hiragana and katakana. Hiragana was derived from the sim-
plification of some kanji in Japanese cursive writing. This writing was widely used by women of
the aristocracy. In the 11th century, two women, Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shōnagon, wrote their
internationally recognized masterpieces, The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book, respectively, using
mainly this writing. As for Japanese men at that time, they reserved hiragana for their personal
correspondence. Katakana was also created from a part of the kanji.
We still use hiragana to indicate grammatical parts of words such as verb endings, functional
words, and so forth. For instance, the kanji for “white” is 白い with the hiraganaいbeing the gram-
matical ending for an adjective. But katakana is typically used to transliterate loan words — words
imported from other languages ピアノpiano, for example, is an imported word and thus is written
in katakana.

We’ve rushed through the history of the three writing scripts in Japanese, but I hope you get the idea!

A FOURTH WRITING SCRIPT?

Some people might say there are four writing scripts in Japanese. What is the fourth one? It’s called
rōmaji, literally Roman letters, which transcribe Japanese sounds into Latin letters, such as “Tokyo.” The
romanization of words can been seen in signs, logos, posters, train stations and other public appara-
tuses and it is part of our everyday life. So, yes we could say it’s used as one of the writing scripts.

6 Japanese Character Writing For Dummies