Writings of Japanese

The Japanese Langue written is probably one of most original; indeed, it utilizes three very dissimilar types of writing S:

a whole of Logogramme S: the Kanji
two Spelling-book S: Hiragana and Katakana,
and the use of the Latin Alphabet Rōmaji in certain more restricted cases.

Directions of the Japanese writing

Traditionally, Japanese is written with the format Tategaki (邵ヲ譖ク縺), i.e. without spaces between the words, from top to bottom and from right to left:

N m R D E v has E E X O has I T has E.C.I. S J U R m L F I p has p O H T U O R U.E. N

But one finds more and more books written with the format Yokogaki (横書き), i.e. from left to right and from top to bottom, like French. It is in particular the case of the scientific works.

Example

Here is an extract of the one of the newspaper Asahi Shimbun of the April 19th 2004 simultaneously using the four forms of writing (kanji in rouge, hiragana in bleu, katakana in vert, rōmaji and Arab numerals in black):

ラドクリフ、マラソン五輪代表、に 1 万 m 出場にも含み

Radokurifu, marason gorin, daihyō neither ichi-man mētoru shutsujō nor Mo fukumi.

" Radcliffe, taking part in the Olympic marathon, will also contribute for the ten thousand mètres."

Some examples of writing in Japanese:

Kanji

Kanji (Characters of the Han), are characters deriving from the characters Chinese and compared to the Japanese language, which they simplified later, modified even created (Kokuji). During the adoption as of these characters Japanese also adopted their pronunciations which last being adapted to the Japanese sound system much poorer as for the variety of the sounds (see the article Kanji for more details). It thus results from it a great number of Homonymie S. The kanjis have sometimes a different direction between Japanese and Chinese, because the loans, facts with the wire of time, were not uniform. One began again sometimes for the direction, sometimes for the pronunciation: one wrote certain Japanese words then, with an already existing pronunciation in the archipelago, with an ideogram which the Chinese pronunciation approached some.

The Japanese education system teaches 1945 kanjis recognized officially by the minister of education of Japan. This training is spread out over most of the schooling of the Japanese pupils. Cepandant, in practice, approximately 1000 are usually used. Only exceptions being kanjis " uniques" , used only for rare family names or places.

Hiragana and Katakana

These two spelling-books make it possible to note the entirety of the existing sounds of the Japanese language (which one could write only with these spelling-books however the homonymy of Japanese (see higher) would allow with difficulty to include/understand the directions of certain words (from where the interest of the Kanji S). The first are used mainly with the writing of the grammatical Morphème S, for that of some words and to the phonetic notation of the kanjis. The seconds are used for the notation of the lexical loans with the foreign languages (except for Chinese and of Korean, whose vocabulary of loan is present in the Japanese language for a long time) and are used as highlighting (like our Italique).

Historically, it is to the women that one owes the existence of the kanas. Not having access to the instruction, they took, for their pronunciations, of the kanjis to the Chinese language, and simplified their layouts. They made a spelling-book of it, giving each other access to the writing which the man refused to them. One locates this appearance of the kanas about the 13th century, in epistolary writings.

Placed into small above the kanjis, these kanas is then called " furiganas" and indicate the pronunciation of an ideogram. These furiganas is very present, for example, in the mangas and works intended for youth: the training of the kanjis being very long, to give the pronunciation is crucial for a young public which will put most of its schooling to learn them.

Rōmaji

Lastly, various romanisation S exists among which the system Hepburn is most known in Occident, the Japanese-shiki more running to the Japan. The Japanese use them not very safe to write words (often technical) impossible to write with the Japanese characters such as for example " CD" or " DVD".

One will refer to the article devoteds to with each system for more details.

External bond

Site proposing of many working papers of which excellent sheets of drive to the writing of Japanese
Training of Kana in the form of plays
Kanbanji - Blog which proposes the training of a kanji every evening, with examples

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