Talk:Kanji/Archive 1

Miscellaneous comments

The following passage was moved from the article:

Kanji were originally introduced into Japan from Korea during the period of close contact between the Yamato state and Baekje, one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea.

I don't know what Sewing referred to, but it may be Suishu->Liechuan->Woguo:

敬佛法, 於百濟求得佛經, 始有文字.

But the 6th century is too late.

Wani (judging from the name, he would be a Lelang Chinese) is said to have brought the Analects and the Thousand-Character Classic during the reign of Emperor Ojin. However, neither Kojiki or Nihonshoki says that he introduced Chinese characters for the first time.

You can find an interesting passage in Samguk Sagi->History of Baekje->King Geunchogo

古記云 百濟開國已來 未有以文字記事 至是 得博士高興 始有書記 然高興未嘗顯於他書 不知其何許人也

This means that according to an old record, Baekje started to use characters to record facts at the same period as Wani came to Japan.

I've introduced some stuffs to examine the date, but there is currently no accepted theory. Considering the close contact with the Lelang (and then Daifang) commandery, that would be earlier than Sewing thinks. --Nanshu 00:21, 19 Oct 2003 (UTC)

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I have modified the history section and put it back in. Unless you have a new theory that Kanji came from Vietnam, you cannot possibly find fault with my new edit. --Sewing 12:38, 19 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Hehe, you can put the sentence "There may exist ET and there may not exist ET." on the article. So, is it meaningful? One looks at a map and finds that the East China Sea lies between China and Japan. And he knows that Chinese characters originated in China. Then he guesses, "Chinese character should have crossed the sea." In fact, there remain various legends that say Chinese went across the East China Sea to Japan. Few minutes later, he looks at the map again and finds a peninsula between China and Japan. He thinks, "These characters may have run through the peninsula." Everyone can write that "informative" passage even if he/she doesn't know the history of Kanji at all! --Nanshu 22:37, 19 Oct 2003 (UTC)

So all the books and Web sites that say Wani came from Korea are wrong? Wrong why? Because of your personal theories? I said "China or Korea" to make it acceptably NPOV to you. You would rather that Wikipedia users have no idea how Kanji got to Japan, I guess. I suppose the idea that Japan might have got something from Korea is so repulsive to you that you simply have to censor the thought! I pity you. --Sewing 23:17, 19 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I fear you misunderstand me. I've never said that Wani did not came from Korea. I mean that he should be Chinese if he was real. As you know, the Chinese maintained colonies in the peninsula over 400 years, implaining Chinese cultures there. I think it would be they who introduced Chinese characters to Japan. Note that in this case, Chinese includes sinicized natives. But almost all Chinese have their roots in non-Chinese, and it is almost impossible to determine how long they had been "Chinese". --Nanshu 23:11, 21 Oct 2003 (UTC)

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Moved from the article

Appropriately, the most common Kanji to be found in daily usage is 日, "sun", which gives rise to the name "land of the rising sun".

What is the point of this? -- Taku 00:23, Oct 20, 2003 (UTC)

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30,300 hits for "Kanzi", but this brings up unrelated hits, so... 709 hits for Kanzi and Japan 2,430 for Kanzi and Japanese

This should be sufficient to allow it to be kept. WhisperToMe 03:25, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

As it is of slight importance, I've moved it towards the end of the paragraph. This does not imply that its existence is trivial, however. --Taoster 05:48, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

I have never, ever seen kanji spelt kanzi. This is one of those situations where there is a standard spelling in English that overrides any obscure system of romanization, besides which, adding all these alternative romanizations is really pointless. They are outdated and never used anymore; anyone who is aware of them would also know Hepburn, and for those who are not it's simply confusing, extraneous, redundant information. Exploding Boy 14:45, May 19, 2004 (UTC)

_____

On what basis or discussion did you decide to move the article to Chinese character in Japan? The title makes no sense. I'm moving it back. Exploding Boy 04:04, Jun 15, 2004 (UTC)

Reason for development of hiragana?

The text of the article includes the sentence, "Only men learned these characters, which eventually led to the development of hiragana as a writing system for women."

Is this historically correct? Or would it be more accurate to say, "Only men learned kanji; when the hiragana writing system was developed, women adopted the hiragana."?

I'm not aware that the hiragana system was devised for women, but rather, for men, as a shorthand for complicated or often-used kanji. -- Anon

I learned that hiragana developed as a form of writing for women, who were generally not taught to read and write kanji. I believe that the entire Genji Monogatari, whose author was a woman, was written in hiragana. Exploding Boy 13:23, Jun 19, 2004 (UTC)

Hiragana was a cursive outgrowth of manyogana. Manyogana were certain Chinese characters used simply as phonetic characters, with no meaning attached, to write poetry. Women were not taught kanji, but they did learn hiragana. Genji Monogatari was indeed written in hiragana, as was the Pillow Book (also by a woman). As an aside, there is a Chinese "women's writing" system, the name of which I can't recall, but would be excellent fodder for a wikipedia entry. adamrice 18:03, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Oh yeah, it begins with an N I think... Exploding Boy 01:55, Jul 17, 2004 (UTC)

Nu Shu. --Menchi 02:06, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

That's the one :) Exploding Boy 02:16, Jul 17, 2004 (UTC)

True, women used hiragana, but...

I don't recall that the reason for development of hiragana was to give women a writing system. I'll put it on my to-do list to find out more... but not sure how soon it'll get done.

Could people please sign their posts. This is getting very confusing. Exploding Boy 14:13, Jun 19, 2004 (UTC)

Kyū-jitai & Shin-jitai

Recently on Wiktionary, a new user has been adding terms like "simplified" and "traditional" to Japanese entries, which has confused those of us who know a little about about Japanese or Chinese. It turns out that Japanese has the terms 旧字体 (kyū-jitai) and 新字体 (shin-jitai) which are to some degree analogous to Chinese's 繁體字 / 繁体字 (fántǐzì) Traditional characters and 簡體字 / 简体字 (jiǎntǐzì) Simplified characters.

I'd love to find out as much about this as I can but there's little information in English on the internet. — Hippietrail 09:45, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Taku's edit

A couple of comments about my edit. Sadly, the article as of today seems not a good article at all. I found there are some overlap between this and other articles like onyomi and Japanese name. Also, the article has almost no mention about shin-jitai and the significant reform that was made in World War II. We also need to mention much more about graphical features of kanji as well. The fact is that kanji seems to look different from Chinese characters used in China. This is, by the way, an issue in unicode. Anyway, so I am doing some major edits. Any inputs are highly welcome as always. -- Taku 10:00, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)

hand to mouth?

Who's been putting in "hand to mouth" for toyo kanji? This is bizarre. As I understand it, there are 881 "essential characters" taught through grade 6, plus another 969 (1850 total) "general use" (toyo) kanji. adamrice

Four-kanji compounds

I think the sentence beginning "When kanji characters are not followed by hiragana" should read:

"When kanji characters are not followed by hiragana they are often grouped in compounds of two or more characters which are pronounced in the on reading."

Then, following the example of "kanji", we should have a short paragraph about four-kanji compounds, called yoji-jukugo, hopefully linked to an article on the subject. I'd do this myself, but I'm sure there are other, more knowledgable folks who could do a better job of it.

- dcljr 15:47, 11 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I almost included something about them when I threw in the extra examples just now, but on reconsideration, that should probably go somewhere else in the article. Although if someone were to write an article on jukugo in general, it probably wouldn't hurt, and would make linking much easier. --Aponar Kestrel (talk) 03:31, 2004 Sep 2 (UTC)

There's now an article on Four-character idioms in Chinese and Japanese, but I can't figure out a good way to link to it in the article! (So I just added it to ==See also==.) - dcljr (talk) 19:02, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Massive rewriting

I've changed around some of the links to hopefully make them more useful; I've also added more of them. Some might think I've overlinked the article; if so, just remove the most egregious cases.

I've also tried to standardize the appearance of the Japanese words used throughout the article, rendering them all in italics rather than "quotes" or with no special formatting. Exceptions are (most) references to the main writing systems: kanji, hiragana and katakana (using italics for the latter two only in the first section when they are more or less defined). Since other Wikipedia articles say there are four Japanese writing systems, I've added a mention of romaji to the intro (sans macron and sans italics, for consistency with the other three systems and with the title of the article it links to).

Finally, I've completely rewritten the section on readings. I hope I've made it flow better. The factual information I added is mostly from Kodansha's Compact Kanji Guide (ISBN 4-7700-1553-4) and Let's Learn Kanji (also Kodansha, ISBN 4-7700-2068-6).

I tried to use all the info that was already in the article, but I had to excise this sentence:

• The word "kanji"(漢字) is a perfect example of this. Its pronunciation is derived from the Chinese word "hanzi".

- dcljr 04:49, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

BTW, duplication with other articles on related topics (mentioned above) can be dealt with using "Main article" or "For more information, see..." or some such thing, as done in other Wikipedia articles (as long as the pointers to the other articles accurately reflect their relationships with this one). - dcljr 05:26, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Shitsuree shimashita

Thanks to the users who caught and corrected my bonehead re-romanizations of /(o|ku)n[-']yomi/. - dcljr 02:16, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

"Shitsuree"? Someone's been reading something by Eleanor Harz Jorden, I take it. ^_^ Dou itasimasite. And while I'm here, I'd like to thank Ran for correcting my own boneheaded error in the on'yomi subsection. --Aponar Kestrel (talk)

Yeah, unfortunately I'm used to a special form of romanization used in the textbook I had. I wish we hadn't used any rōmaji at all. I still visualize it instead of the kana when I'm trying to remember words. Grrr. - dcljr 04:27, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)

#When to use which reading

... and I possibly need to apologize for this, myself. Well, there's more text in there now, at least -- lots of shiny examples -- but this may or may not be a good thing, considering how cluttered I seem to have left it. It probably desperately needs refactoring, at the very least. --Aponar Kestrel (talk) 03:42, 2004 Sep 2 (UTC)

The direction for writing kanji?

Here's a question I was hoping to answer by reading the kanji article: in what direction is kanji written? (There may be a technical term for this.) Is it left-to-right then top-down? Or is that an accomodation to English and the Internet? I often seem to see kanji written primarily top-down (and then left-to-right or right-to-left?). Is that traditional? Obsolete?

I suspect that this would be a good topic to add to the article.

Good question, but I think related to combinations of characters rather than single Kanjis. Japanese phrases are traditionally written top-down and added from right to left. With Western influence now they are often written left to right, and added from top to bottom. In pre-war texts, and today when written on the side of a vehicule (presumably to facilitate reading text on a moving vehicule), phrases are written right to left. If your question relates to the brushstroke order and direction in a single Kanji, I am afraid it is a very difficult question without a simple answer, and these have to be learnt for every single Kanji.PHG 09:50, 11 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Vehicles can have text that reads from left to right, or from right to left. Left-to-right text is more common, and often found on both sides and on the back, whereas right-to-left, when it's used, is usually only on the right side of the vehicle, where right-to-left coincides with front-to-back. Again, as PHG said, that's the sequence for phrases of text (not individual strokes within a single kanji). Fg2 10:00, Sep 11, 2004 (UTC)

To make sure I understand, let me suggest this addition to the article. If it holds for all hanzi derived writing, maybe it should be added to Chinese character.

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Kanji can be written either horizontally or vertically. Traditionally, kanji are written top-to-bottom and then added right-to-left:

5	0
6	1
7	2
8	3
9	4

With Western influence, they are now often written left-to-right and then added top-to-bottom (just like English):

0	1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9

To facilitate reading kanji on a moving vehicle, kanji can be written front-to-back. That is left-to-right on the port side and right-to-left on the starboard side.

4	3	2	1	0	front	0	1	2	3	4

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This is not really a kanji question, it's a Japanese-writing-system question. Kanji is just one component of the Japanese writing system, and you can't discuss the writing direction of kanji in isolation from the rest.

Anyhow: Until WW2, Japanese was mostly written top-down, right to left (particularly in newspaper articles and longer works of prose), or right-to-left, top down. Since the war, it is written top-down, right to left (as before) or left-to-right, top down. Books, being almost always written top-down, open at the opposite side from what English-speakers expect; magazines (which may use a combination of the two) are not predictable. The only modern situation where you see horizontal RTL is on the sides of trucks so that they read front-to-back. adamrice 02:07, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)

proper nouns (place and personal names) that do not (cannot) have Kanji

From Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English

• Article: ja:さいたま市#地名の由来 (just this segment)
• Corresponding English-language article: Saitama, Saitama#Toponym
• Worth doing because: Saitama seems to be one of the few large cities whose name doesn't have Kanji. The origin of this name is hard to find on English webpages.
• Originally requested by: --Menchi 10:29, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)
• Status: I have translated it, hopefully this is helpful! CES 06:14, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
• Other notes: Adding a paragraph on those proper nouns (place and personal names) that do not (cannot) have Kanji in Kanji would be informative too.

Just briefly, Saitama City (-shi) is written in kana to differentiate it from Saitama Prefecture (-ken). The kanji for Saitama is 埼玉. Exploding Boy 15:40, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)

changes

A few changes I made:

• Not all foreign words were written in phonetically spelled kanji. "tabako", for instance, was written with the kanji for "smoke" and "grass" (a spelling you still see occasionally).
• Added a comment about Morohashi's kanji dictionary
• The word is "akagane", not "akakane".
• I have trouble putting Japanese in, so I can't make this change. But "juubako" only refers to compound words in which the first kanji is an on-yomi and the second is kun-yomi. There's a separate term for the other way around, which I don't remember at the moment.
• I have never seen the term "Essential Kanji" used for the grade-school kanji except in the title of one textbook for English speakers. In addition, 881 is an obsolete number -- the grade school kanji list was expanded to 1006 in 1981 (at the same time the Jouyou list was introduced).

reverse importation of Kanji...?

Can anyone cite any evidence that made-in-Japan kanji are actually used in China? Just because the character for "hataraku" has an onyomi doesn't mean that it's been taken into China--it just means that the Japanese came up with an onyomi for it. adamrice 17:12, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I believe the answer to your original question would be "NO". First of all, there are not many made-in-Japan "kanji" because Kanji literally means Chinese characters in Japanese. So even if there are Japanese variations, the original Chinese version will be used instead in China. The answer to your specific question about 働 hataraku is a no also. The onyomi was based on the right half of the character which is Chinese. Chinese 勞動 vs Japanese 労働. The Japanese character 働 is never used in Chinese. Do a search in Google and specify this character and restrict the result to Chinese pages only. You will some webpages using this character, but they are mostly Japanese pages mislabeled as Chinese pages. They are some Chinese pages using this character in the context of referring to the Japanese Labor ministry. I don't count that as reverse importation. IMHO, the statement in the article about reverse importation is incorrect.

However, if your question is modified a bit by replacing the word "kanji" with "Japanese terminologies", then the answer is a little bit different. Hong Kong is a Chinese place which is influenced heavily by foreign culture. Some Japanese terminologies sometimes appear in taboid publications for the novality effects, e.g. the Japanese term 人気女優 will be written as 人氣女優 to mean popular Japanese actresses. Most Chinese who are not fans of Japanese culture would not understand what the novality term means. Therefore such usage can be found, but are very uncommon. And such term is never used on non-Japanese actresses. By the way 優 was an archaic Chinese word that means actor, but such meaning is no longer used in modern Chinese, though Japanese preserved the original meaning. Note that 気 is one of the rare Made-in-Japan Kanji that you mentioned. It is a variation for 氣 or 气. And Chinese don't use the Japanese version at all. Even when Japanese terminologies are used in China, the characters would be written and pronounced the Chinese way, not in the Japanese way.

There are a few Japanese characters that show up in Chinese publications too. One example is the Japanese Yen currency symbol 円 which is sometimes used but not very common either because there is another way to write Yen in Chinese characters. Another example is Japanese rice (Donburi 丼). The character is sometime used in magazine ads for Japanese restaurants. Again, regular Chinese won't know what it means. Ironically, this 丼 character is actually an archaic Chinese character that is no longer in use in modern Chinese. In ancient literature, this character means the sound of an object dropping into a water well. The character is written as a dot inside the "Water well" character. In Mandarin, it is pronounced as ㄉㄢˇ. In Cantonese, this character is pronounced as "Dum". The term is still used in daily Cantonese conversation but not many people know this ancient character and the verbal expression Dum is related. The Japanese probably borrowed the word by its sound, Dum for Donburi or borrowed for its shape, a dot representing the rice in the middle of a box. Kowloonese 22:28, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for that. The case with 気 vs its Chinese equivalents is really just a matter of 新字体 vs 旧字体; the 働 character is semantically different (at least in Japan) from 動 and is a different case. Most 国字 are for plants and animals, as far as I know, and 働 is both the only everyday 国字 I can think of, and the only one with an 音読み. It's also the case that Japanese hangs on to some kanji archaisms that have gone out of fashion in China, just as there are a few words in American English that have gone out of style in British English (eg "gotten"). I'm going to revise the article to take that reverse-importation bit out.

Many Chinese scientific and polisci terminology terms are Japanese imports as well. --Menchi 22:37, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Agree. There were many Japanese terminology and concept imports. But they are not Kanji import as in the 働 hataraku character mentioned in the article. IMHO, the reverse importation is plainly wrong. Japanese kokuji (国字; literally "national characters") are NOT used by Chinese, period. Kowloonese 23:02, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Very late addition: The character 腺 was imported from Japanese to Chinese.

As noted, 労働 becomes 劳动 in Chinese -- 働 becomes 動 / 动.

Bathrobe 17:08, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Changing "cursive" hiragana to "curvilinear"

This is my first posting in wikipedia, please be gentle. I wanted to post here before I make the edit.

I note that this article refers to hiragana as a "cursive" writing system. I believe this is incorrect because Cursive as documented in Wikipedia refers to writing where the characters are joined. Hirigana characters no more joined than katakana or kanji characters. I believe the mistake comes from the similarity of "cursive" to "curvilinear," which I believe is the correct word.

I will make the edit if nobody objects. Toastcontrol 11:00, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I think I'm the one who put the word "cursive" in there in the first place. I agree that it may not be a perfect fit, in that hiragana characters are not run together (generally--although if you look at the scrolls from the Tales of Genji, you'll see they can be). Rather, the many strokes that go into the source kanji are consolidated and run together. There may be a more precise word for this phenomenon than "cursive," but I'm not convinced that "curvilinear" is it (which might better describe gyosho-style kanji). adamrice 20:25, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)

________

Hirigana may run together in cursive fashion, as may kanji or even katakana when represented in an artistic fashion such as shodo. But that is not a defining characteristic of any of those writing systems. I believe "curvilinear" (formed, bounded, or characterized by curved lines) aptly captures the contrast between hiragana and katakana, more than any other single word.

where did this come from?

I just ran across the following section in this article:

"Hiragana is also used in books for young children and to impart a softer tone to words and requests. Words or parts of words like kudasai (ください please) and kodomo (子ども children) are usually written in hiragana. Conversely, because of its angularity, katakana came to be used for representing onomatopoeia, harsh and sudden sounds, animal noises, and foreign words. "

I'd like to see some kind of academic citation to back up these assertions, which I find incredible. There's nothing about its angularity that makes katakana better suited to loan words, just as there's nothing about its flowing lines that makes italics better suited to loan words in English. It's just a matter of convention. The bit about "子ども" usually being written in hiragana is self-contradicting. Finally, this stuff would belong in the kana article (f iit it belonged anywhere, which I contend it does not). adamrice 01:46, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

Some explanation of why kana are used instead of kanji in some situations does not seem out of place in an article about kanji to me.

I agree about the angularity part though, although it would not be out of place to mention that katakana can be used to add emphasis to a word usually written in kanji or hiragana.

"Hiragana is also used in books for young children and to impart a softer tone to words and requests. Words or parts of words like kudasai (ください please) and kodomo (子ども children) are usually written in hiragana.

This seems alright to me, 子供 can be written as 子ども to make it easier to read for children, and ください has a gentler conotation then 下さい. JeroenHoek 19:42, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

Removed a false link

I removed this link: The JLPT Kanji (http://www.jlpt-kanji.com) project lists the full Jōyō kanji required for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test

The site listed above is using out-dated material. For example the current JLPT test contents specification lists 103 kanji for Level 4, but the above site lists only 80 kanji for Level 4. White Rabbit Press (http://www.whiterabbitpress.us) is using the most current test contents specification.

JIS Kanji

I have expanded the JIS Kanji section to cover the other JIS standards. JimBreen 02:45, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Types of Kanji: by category

I have added a new section extracted from my page at: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/kanjitypes.html. It seemed appropriate given the other categorization of kanji in the article. JimBreen 05:39, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That's an excellent addition, Jim. adamrice 17:11, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

This duplicates the contents of the pages Chinese characters and Chinese character classification. I'm not sure it belongs here anyway, since it is not specifically about the Japanese use of the characters. I suggest merging this into one of the two above pages. --DannyWilde 14:51, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

I’m editing the Chinese character, Chinese character classification, Oracle bone and Kanji pages for consistency of the terms used in the 六書 liu4shu1 classification of char’s, as well as to point out the problematic nature of Xŭ Shèn’s classification. I’ve fixed errors such as misconstruing oracle bone graphs as “generally pictograms”; and will deal with problematic nature of terms such as ideograph, radical, etc. as needed. Work in progress this week (not quite done yet).Dragonbones 02:55, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Daily-use characters etc. and side remarks.

If these names are to be used, they should be used for the article titles as well. For example, "joyo kanji" article should be moved to "daily use kanji". Anyway the names appear to be arbitrary translations. Unless the Japanese authorities who give the Japanese names like joyo kanji have also given these rather unlikely and frankly silly English names, it is better to use the Japanese name since it is unambiguous and no one I have ever heard of talks about "daily use kanji" in English, everyone says "joyo kanji". Anyway I removed all the English names from the article. Further, there were a lot of "side remarks" in the article, and I removed them all since they might be appropriate in a general article on the Japanese language, but seem out of place in an article on kanji. --DannyWilde 14:44, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Good enough?

Nice job, everyone, on this article. I did some work on it several months ago but haven't been back until today. I'm wondering, is it time to nominate this for Featured Article status? - dcljr (talk) 18:45, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

形声文字 (keiseimoji)

The explanation isn't correct in this article. Hanzi in this category gives the chinese pronounce of the word and its radical gives the meaning of it. For instance 馬 (ma) which means horse and 媽 (ma) with the radical 女 (nu) woman gives meaning of mother and ma gives the chinese pronouce. More examples with horse is like 駡,嗎,嗎, etc... All "ma" but with different meanings.

So what does this mean: "Typically they are made up of two components, one of which indicates the meaning or semantic context, and the other the pronunciation."?

Bathrobe 04:06, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

The example about 言 shape is wrong!!! 語 (yu), 記 (ji), 説 (shuo) They have different pronounce. It has to be the almost the same pronounce with different radical.

The article says: "As examples of this, consider the kanji with the 言 shape: 語, 記, 訳, 説, etc. All are related to word/language/meaning." In other words, 言 tells you the related meaning (word/language/meaning). The article does not say they have the same pronunciation.

Bathrobe 07:24, 25 March 2006 (UTC)