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Japanese Language

Japanese language

Japanese (Japanese: 日本語（にほんご Nihongo, ) is a language spoken by over 127 million people, mainly in Japan, but also by Japanese emigrant communities around the world. It is considered an agglutinative language and is distinguished by a 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. The sound inventory of Japanese is relatively small, and it has a lexically-distinctive pitch accent system. Though the two languages are completely unrelated, Japanese has been heavily influenced by Chinese over a period of at least 1,500 years. Japanese is written with a mix of Chinese characters (kanji) and a modified syllabary, kana, also originally based on Chinese characters. Much vocabulary has been imported from Chinese, or created on Chinese models.

Classification

Historical linguists who specialize in Japanese agree that it is one of the two members of the Japonic language family, but remain divided as to the origins of the Japonic languages. An older view, still widely held by some linguists and many non-linguists, is that Japanese is a language isolate. As for its relation to other languages, there are several theories (presented roughly in descending order of certainty):
- Japanese is a relative of extinct languages spoken by historic cultures in what are now the Korean peninsula and Manchuria. The best attested of these is the language of Goguryeo (a.k.a. Koguryo), with the more poorly-attested languages of Baekje (a.k.a. Paekche) and Buyeo (a.k.a Puyo) hypothesized to also be related. The limited data on these languages, as well as these cultures' historic ties, are the primary evidence.
- Japanese is a relative of Korean. This theory is based on the high degree of similarity between Japanese and Korean grammar. Proponents of this theory have also put proposed Japanese-Korean cognates. The idea of a Japanese-Korean relationship has been largely subsumed into the Altaic theory.
- Japanese is a member of the Altaic language family. Other languages in this group include Mongolian, Tungusic, Turkish, and (according to most proponents) Korean. Evidence for this theory lies in the fact that like Turkish and Korean, Japanese is an agglutinative language. Additionally, there are a suggestive number of apparently regular correspondences in basic vocabulary, such as ishi "stone" to Turkic daş, yon "four" to Turkic dört, kura "saddle" to Turkic kürtün, kiru "to cut" to Turkic kir-, inu "dog" to Turkic it, kumo "cloud" to Turkic köl "shadow", etc. These examples originate from [http://starling.rinet.ru/cgi-bin/query.cgi?root=config&basename=\data\alt\altet this database], which contains a comprehensive list of comparisons and theoretical Altaic etymologies.
- Japanese is a creole language. Phonological similarities and geographical proximity to Austronesian languages have led to the theory that Japanese may be a kind of creole, with an Altaic substratum and an Austronesian superstratum, or vice versa.
- Japanese is a purely Austronesian language. This theory enjoys little currency, since the grammar and lexis of Japanese are vastly different from those of any known Austronesian language.
- Ono Susumu has suggested a possible relationship between Japanese and Tamil, a member of the Dravidian language family spoken in southern India. Specialists in Japanese historical linguistics all agree that Japanese is related to the Ryukyuan languages (including Okinawan); together, Japanese and Ryukyuan are grouped in the Japonic languages. Among these specialists, the possibility of a genetic relation to Goguryeo has the most evidence; relationship to Korean is considered plausible but is still up to debate; the Altaic hypothesis has somewhat less currency, though it has grown significantly more respectable in recent years, primarily due to the work of Sergei Starostin, et al. Almost all specialists reject the idea that Japanese could be genetically related to Austronesian/Malayo-Polynesian languages or Sino-Tibetan languages, and the idea that Japanese could be related to Tamil is almost entirely excluded. It should be noted that linguistic studies, like all fields, can be strongly affected by national politics and other non-academic factors. For example, most linguists would say that Romanian and Moldovan are essentially the same language, and that they are known as two different languages for political reasons. Japan's long-standing rivalries and enmities with virtually all of its neighbours make the study of linguistic connection particularly fraught with such political tensions. However, these tensions are less prevalent among non-Japanese researchers.

Geographic distribution

Although Japanese is spoken almost exclusively in Japan, it has been and is still sometimes spoken in countries besides Japan. When Japan occupied Korea, Taiwan, parts of China, and various Pacific islands, locals in those countries were forced to learn Japanese in empire-building programmes. As a result, there are still many people in these countries who speak Japanese instead of or as well as the local languages. In addition, emigrants from Japan, the majority of whom are found in Brazil, where the biggest Japanese community outside Japan is found, Australia (especially Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne), and the United States (notably California and Hawaii), also frequently speak Japanese. There is also a small community in Davao, Philippines. Their descendants (known as nikkei 日系, literally Japanese descendants), however, rarely speak Japanese fluently. There are estimated to be several million non-Japanese studying the language as well.

Official status

Japanese is the de facto official language of Japan, and Japan is the only country to have Japanese as an official working language. There are two forms of the language considered standard: or standard Japanese, and or the common language. As government policy has modernized Japanese, many of the distinctions between the two have blurred. Hyōjungo is taught in schools and used on television and in official communications, and is the version of Japanese discussed in this article.

Dialects

Dozens of dialects are spoken in Japan. The profusion is due to the mountainous island terrain and Japan's long history of both external and internal isolation. Dialects typically differ in terms of pitch accent, inflectional morphology, vocabulary, particle usage, and pronunciation. Some even differ in vowel and consonant inventories, although this is uncommon. Dialects from less central regions, such as the Tōhoku or Tsushima dialect may be unintelligible to speakers from other parts of the country. The dialect used in Kagoshima in southern Kyūshū is famous for being unintelligible not only to speakers of standard Japanese but to speakers of nearby dialects elsewhere in Kyūshū as well. Kagoshima dialect is 84% cognate with standard Tokyo dialect. The Ryukyuan languages are spoken in the islands of Okinawa Prefecture. Not only is each language unintelligible to Japanese speakers, but most are unintelligible to those who speak other Ryukyuan languages. Due to the close relationship of Ryukyuan and Japanese, they are still sometimes said to be only dialects of one language, but modern scholars consider them to be separate languages. Recently, Standard Japanese has become prevalent nationwide, due not only to television and radio, but also to increased mobility within Japan due to its system of roads, railways, and airports. Young people usually speak their local dialect and the standard language, though in most cases, the local dialect is influenced by the standard, and regional versions of "standard" Japanese have local-dialect influence.

Sounds

Japanese vowels are "pure" sounds, similar to their Italian or Spanish counterparts. The only unusual vowel is the high back vowel , which is like , but unrounded. Japanese has five vowels, and vowel length is phonemic, so each one has both a short and a long version. Some Japanese consonants have several allophones, which may give the impression of a larger inventory of sounds. However, some of these allophones have since become phonemic. For example, in the Japanese of the first half of the twentieth century, was palatalized to , approximately chi; however, now and are distinct, as evidenced by words like paatii "party" and tii "tea." The syllabic structure and the phonotactics are very simple: the only consonant clusters allowed within a syllable consist of one of a subset of the consonants plus /y/. However, consonant clusters across syllables within the word are common, though limited in type.

Grammar

The basic Japanese word order is Subject Object Verb. Subject and object are usually marked by particles which come after the word. The basic sentence structure is topic-comment. For example, Kochira wa Tanaka san desu. Kochira ("this") is the topic of the sentence, indicated by the particle wa. The verb is desu ("be"). As a phrase, Tanaka san desu is the comment. This sentence loosely translates to "As for this person, (it) is Mr./Mrs./Ms. Tanaka". Thus Japanese, like Chinese and Korean, is often called a topic-prominent language, which means it indicates the topic separately from the subject, and the two do not always coincide. The sentence Zō wa hana ga nagai. literally means, "As for elephants, the nose is long." The topic is zō "elephant," and the subject is hana "nose." Japanese nouns have neither number nor gender. Thus hon may mean "book" or "books". It is possible to explicitly indicate more than one, either by using numbers, often with a counter. Words for people are usually singular. Thus Tanaka san usually means Mr/Ms Tanaka. Words that refer to people and animals can be made to indicate groups with noun suffixes that indicate groups, such as -tachi. Though some words, like hitobito "people," always refer to more than one, Japanese has no true plurals. Verbs are conjugated to show tenses, of which there are two: past and present, or non-past, which is used for the present and the future. For some verbs, that represent an ongoing process, the -te iru form indicates a continuous (or progressive) tense. For others, that represent a change of state, the -te iru form indicates a perfect tense. For example, kite iru means "He has come (and is still here)", but tabete iru means "He is eating". Questions are formed by adding a question element to the end of the verb, usually ka. For example, :Kore de ii desu. "This is OK." becomes :Kore de ii desu ka. "Is this OK?" Negatives are formed with verb endings. For example, :Pan o taberu. "I will eat bread." becomes :Pan o tabenai. "I will not eat bread." with taberu "to eat" changing to the negative form tabenai "to not eat". The word desu/da is the copula verb. It corresponds approximately to the English be, but often takes on other roles. A separate function of "to be" is to indicate existence, as in "there is", for which the verbs aru and iru are used for inanimate and animate things, respectively. For example, :Neko ga iru. "There's a cat.", and :Ii kangae ga nai. "I haven't got a good idea." The verb "to do" (suru, polite form shimasu) is often used to make verbs from nouns (ai suru "to love", benkyō suru "to study", etc.). Japanese also has a huge number of compound verbs (e.g. tobidasu "to fly out, to flee," from tobu "to fly, to jump" + dasu "to go out"). There are three types of adjective: #keiyōshi, or i adjectives, which have a conjugating ending i which can become, for example, past, or negative. For example atsui ("to be hot") #:atsui hi "a hot day". #keiyōdōshi, or na adjectives, which are followed by a form of the copula, usually na. For example hen (strange) #:hen na hito "a strange person". #rentaishi, also called true adjectives, such as onaji "the same" #:onaji hi "the same day". Both keiyōshi and keiyōdōshi may predicate sentences. For example, :Gohan ga atsui. "The rice is hot." :Kare wa hen da. "He's strange." Both inflect, though they do not show the full range of conjugation found in true verbs. The rentaishi are few in number, and unlike the other words, are limited to modifying nouns. They never predicate sentences. Examples include ookina "big" and onaji "the same" (although there is a noun onaji that can be followed by da, as in onaji da). Both keiyōdōshi and keiyōshi form adverbs, by following with ni in the case of keiyōdōshi: :hen ni naru "become strange", and by changing i to ku in the case of keiyōshi: :atsuku naru "become hot". The grammatical function of nouns is indicated by postpositions, also called particles. These include
- no for possession, :watashi no kamera "my camera"
- ga for subject, :Kare ga yatta. "He did it."
- o for direct object :Nani o tabemasu ka? "What will (you) eat?"
- ni for indirect object, :Tanaka san ni kiite kudasai "Please ask Mr./Ms. Tanaka",
- wa for the topic and many others. Japanese has many words that are translated as pronouns in English, such as watashi or boku, both meaning "I". Which is used depends upon many factors, including the sex and status of the speaker, who is being spoken to, and the social setting. Their use is often optional, since Japanese is described as a so-called pro-drop language, i.e., one in which the subject of a sentence does not always need to be stated. For example, instead of saying :Watashi wa byōki desu. "I am sick.", if the speaker is understood to be the subject, one could simply say Byōki desu. A single verb can be a complete sentence: :yatta! "(I / we / they / etc) did (it)!".

Politeness

Unlike most western languages, Japanese has an extensive grammatical system to express politeness and formality. Broadly speaking, there are three main politeness levels in spoken Japanese: the plain form (kudaketa 砕けた), the simple polite form (teineigo 丁寧語) and the advanced polite form (keigo 敬語). Since most relationships are not equal in Japanese society, one person typically has a higher position. This position is determined by a variety of factors including job, age, experience, or even psychological state (e.g., a person asking a favour tends to do so politely). The person in the lower position is expected to use a polite form of speech, whereas the other might use a more plain form. Strangers will also speak to each other politely. Japanese children rarely use polite speech until they are teens, at which point they are expected to begin speaking in a more adult manner. See uchi-soto The plain form in Japanese is recognized by the shorter, dictionary form of verbs, and the da form of the copula. At the teinei level, verbs end with the helping verb -masu, and the copula desu is used. The advanced polite form, keigo, actually consists of two kinds of politeness: honorific language (sonkeigo) and humble (kenjōgo) language. Whereas teineigo is an inflectional system, keigo often employs many special (often irregular) honorific and humble verb forms. The difference between honorific and humble speech is particularly pronounced in the Japanese language. Humble language is used to talk about oneself or one's own group (company, family) whilst honorific language is mostly used when describing the interlocutor and his group. For example, the -san suffix ("Mr", "Mrs" or "Ms") is an example of honorific language. It is not used to talk about oneself or when talking about someone from one's company to an external person, since the company is the speaker's "group". Most nouns in the Japanese language may be made polite by the addition of o- or go-; as a prefix. o- is generally used for words of native Japanese origin, whereas go- is affixed to words of Chinese derivation. In some cases, the prefix has become a fixed part of the word, and is included even in regular speech, such as gohan 'cooked rice; meal.' Such a construction often indicates deference to either the item's owner or to the object itself. For example, the word tomodachi 'friend,' would become o-tomodachi when referring to the friend of someone of higher status (though mothers often use this form to refer to their children's friends). On the other hand, a female speaker may sometimes refer to mizu 'water' as o-mizu merely to show politeness; this contrasts with the more abrupt speech of men (though men may also use very polite forms when speaking to superiors). See Gender differences in spoken Japanese. Many researchers report that since the 1990s, the use of polite forms has become rarer. Needless to say, many older people disapprove of this trend. Most Japanese people employ politeness to indicate a lack of familiarity. That is, they use polite forms for new acquaintances, but if a relationship becomes more intimate, they no longer use them. This occurs regardless of age, social class, or gender. Young people usually receive extensive training in the "proper" use of polite language when they start to work for a company.

Vocabulary

The original language of Japan was the so-called yamato kotoba. In addition to this original language, Japanese also has a great number of words that were either borrowed from Chinese or constructed on Chinese patterns. These words entered the language from the fifth century onwards via contact with Chinese culture. Chinese based words comprise as much as seventy percent of the total vocabulary of the Japanese language and form as much as thirty to forty percent of words used in speech. A much smaller number of words has been borrowed from Korean and Ainu. Japan has also borrowed a number of words from other languages, gairaigo. This began with borrowings from Portuguese in the 16th century, followed by borrowing from Dutch during Japan's long isolation of the Edo period. With the Meiji restoration and the reopening of Japan in the 19th century, borrowing occurred from German, French and English. Currently, words of English origin are the most commonly borrowed. In the Meiji era, the Japanese also coined many neologisms using Chinese patterns to translate Western concepts. The Chinese and Koreans imported many of these pseudo-Chinese words into Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese via their kanji characters in the late 19th and early 20th century. For example, 政治 seiji ("politics"), and 化学 kagaku ("chemistry"). As a result, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese share a large common corpus of vocabulary in the same way a large number of Greco-Roman words is shared among European languages. In the past few decades, wasei-eigo (made-in-Japan English) has become a prominent phenomenon. Words such as wanpataan (< one + pattern, "to be in a rut", "to have a one-track mind") and sukinshippu (< skin + -ship, "physical contact"), although coined from English, are nonsensical in a non-Japanese context. A small number of such words, such as anime and cosplay, have been borrowed back into English. Additionally, many native Japanese words have become commonplace in English, due to the popularity of many Japanese cultural exports. Words such as sushi, judo, karate, sumo, karaoke, origami, samurai, haiku, ninja, sayonara, rickshaw (from 人力車 jinrikisha), futon, and many others have become part of the English language. See list of English words of Japanese origin for more.

Writing system

Modern Japanese is written in a mixture of three main scripts: 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. The Roman alphabet (romaji) is also sometimes used.

Learning Japanese

Learning Japanese involves understanding grammar, pronunciation, the writing system, and acquiring adequate vocabulary. While the sound system is simple to master compared with those of other languages, the writing system poses a challenge for those not used to Chinese characters. On the other hand one learns a lot about Japanese culture by studying kanji characters. Japanese students begin to learn kanji characters from their first grade of an elementary school. A guideline created by the Japanese Ministry of Education, the kyōiku kanji, specifies the 1,006 simple characters a child is to learn by the end of sixth grade. Children continue to study another 939 characters in a junior high school, which totally covers 1,945 jōyō kanji (common kanji) characters, which are usually considered sufficient for everyday life. Japanese can be learned without studying Chinese characters. However, Japanese borrowed thousands upon thousands of words from Chinese, and for various reasons, many of these Chinese-based words are now homophones (words pronounced identically) in Japanese. This may make it necessary to learn the characters if one wants to learn an extended vocabulary, although blind Japanese people who cannot read any characters are able to function in the spoken language without problems, since most words, even if not written down, can be understood by the context. "Nihon" (にほん) can mean "two long, thin objects" (二本) as well as "Japan" (日本). However, these two words have different accents, and are distinct even in isolation. Major universities throughout the world provide Japanese language courses. Moreover, South Korea, Australia, France, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Denmark and some states of the United States provide the language course at high schools or lower level schools. About 2.3 million people studied the language worldwide in 2003. 900,000 South Koreans, 389,000 Chinese people, 381,000 Australians, and 140,000 Americans study Japanese in lower and higher educational institutions. The Japanese government provides standard tests to measure spoken and written comprehension of Japanese for second language learners; the most prominent is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). The Japanese External Trade Organization JETRO organizes the Business Japanese Proficiency Test, to test ability to understand Japanese in a business setting. In Japan, more than 90,000 foreign students study at Japanese universities and Japanese language schools, including 77,000 Chinese and 15,000 South Koreans in 2003. Furthermore, local governments and some NPO groups provide free Japanese language classes for foreign residents, including Japanese Brazilians and foreign wives married to Japanese nationals. See also List of resources for learning Japanese.

External links

- [http://users.tmok.com/~tumble/jpp/japor.html Origin of the Japanese People and Language]
- [http://web.archive.org/web/20030618070124/http%3A//www-lib.icu.ac.jp/LibShuppan/lecture/6-2-1.html North Kyushu Creole] – A hypothesis concerning the multilingual formation of Japanese
- [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=1263 Ethnologue report for Japanese]
- [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=jpn Ethnologue report for language code JPN]

Bibliography

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- Bloch, Bernard. (1946). Studies in colloquial Japanese II: Syntax. Language, 22, 200-248.
- Chafe, William L. (1976). Giveness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In C. Li (Ed.), Subject and topic (pp. 25-56). New York: Academic Press. ISBN 0-1244-7350-4.
- Kuno, Susumu. (1973). The structure of the Japanese language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0-2621-1049-0.
- Kuno, Susumu. (1976). Subject, theme, and the speaker's empathy: A re-examination of relativization phenomena. In Charles N. Li (Ed.), Subject and topic (pp. 417-444). New York: Academic Press. ISBN 0-1244-7350-4.
- Martin, Samuel E. (1975). A reference grammar of Japanese. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-3000-1813-4.
- McClain, Yoko Matsuoka. (1981). Handbook of modern Japanese grammar: 口語日本文法便覧 [Kōgo Nihon bumpō]. Tokyo: Hokuseido Press. ISBN 4-5900-0570-0; ISBN 0-8934-6149-0.
- Miller, Roy. (1967). The Japanese language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Miller, Roy. (1980). Origins of the Japanese language: Lectures in Japan during the academic year, 1977-78. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ISBN 0-2959-5766-2.
- Mizutani, Osmau; & Mizutani, Nobuko. (1987). How to be polite in Japanese: 日本語の敬語 [Nihongo no keigo]. Tokyo: Japan Times. ISBN 4-7890-0338-8; ISBN 4-7890-0338-9.
- Shibatani, Masayoshi. (1990). Japanese. In B. Comrie (Ed.), The major languages of east and south-east Asia. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-4150-4739-0.
- Shibatani, Masayoshi. (1990). The languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-5213-6070-6 (hbk); ISBN 0-5213-6918-5 (pbk).
- Shibamoto, Janet S. (1985). Japanese women's language. New York: Academic Press. ISBN 0-1264-0030-X. Graduate Level
- Tsujimura, Natsuko. (1996). An introduction to Japanese linguistics. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-6311-9855-5 (hbk); ISBN 0-6311-9856-3 (pbk). Upper Level Textbooks
- Tsujimura, Natsuko. (Ed.) (1999). The handbook of Japanese linguistics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-6312-0504-7. Readings/Anthologies zh-min-nan:Ji̍t-pún-oē ko:일본어 ms:Bahasa Jepun ja:日本語 simple:Japanese language th:ภาษาญี่ปุ่น

Japanese honorifics

Honorific speech is speech which shows respect. Japanese has many honorifics, and their use is mandatory in many social situations. Honorifics in Japanese may be used to emphasise social distance or disparity in rank, or to emphasise social intimacy or similarity in rank. The system of honorifics in Japan is very extensive, including various levels of respectful, humble, and polite speech, and it closely resembles the honorific systems of the Korean language, and in some elements, Chinese.

Types of honorific

Honorifics in Japanese are broadly referred to as keigo (敬語, literally "respectful language"), and fall under three main categories: sonkeigo (尊敬語; respectful language), kensongo (謙遜語) or kenjōgo (謙譲語), modest or humble language, and teineigo (丁寧語), polite language. Each type of speech has its own vocabulary and verb endings. For example, the standard form of the verb to do is suru. This form is appropriate with family members and close friends. The polite (teineigo) form of to do is shimasu. This form is appropriate in most daily interactions. When showing respect, such as when talking about a customer or a superior, however, the polite form shimasu becomes the exalted (sonkeigo) form nasaimasu, and when referring to one's own actions or the actions of a group member, it becomes the humble (kenjōgo) itashimasu or shiteorimasu.

Polite language

Polite language, teineigo, is characterized by the use of the verb "desu" and the verb ending "masu" and the use of prefixes such as "o" and "go" towards neutral objects. Television presenters invariably use polite language, and it is the form of the language taught to most learners of Japanese. Some nouns have polite versions. For example, the words otoko (man) and onna (woman) are not considered polite language. To make them polite, for example, one can use the words dansei (man) and josei (woman), or otoko no hito (man) and onna no hito (woman). Polite language does not convey respect or humility. It can be used to refer to one's own actions or those of other people.

Respectful language

Respectful language, sonkeigo, is a special form of language used when talking about superiors and customers. It is not used to talk about oneself. For example, when a Japanese hairdresser or dentist requests their client to take a seat, they say o kake ni natte kudasai to mean "please sit down". However, they would use the verb suwaru rather than o kake ni naru to refer to themselves sitting down. The respectful version of language can only be used to refer to others. In general, respectful language is directed at those in positions of power. For example, a superior at work, or a customer. It also implies that the speaker is acting in a professional capacity. It is characterized by lengthy polite expressions. Verbs may be substituted by more polite ones, for example, suru (do) by nasaru, or hanasu (talk) by ossharu. Some of these transformations are many-to-one; iku, (go), kuru (come), and iru (be) all become "irassharu", and taberu (eat) and nomu (drink) both become meshiagaru. Verbs may also be subsituted by more respectful forms. One respectful form is a modification of the verb with a prefix and a polite suffix. For example, yomu (read) becomes "o-yomi-ni-naru", with the prefix "o" added to the i-form of the verb, and the verb ending ni naru. The passive form can also be used to convey respect, thus "did you read it?" (yomimashita ka) becomes "was it read by you?" (yomaremashita ka). Nouns also change to express respect. The normal Japanese word for person, hito, 人, becomes kata, 方, in respectful language. Thus a customer would normally be expected to be referred to as a kata rather than a hito.

Humble language

In general, humble language is used when describing one's actions or the actions of a person in one's in-group to others such as customers in business. Humble language tends to imply that one's actions are taking place in order to assist the other person. Humble language (kensongo or kenjōgo) is similar to respectful language, in substituting verbs with other forms. For example suru (do) becomes itasu, and taberu (eat) becomes itadaku. These two verbs are also seen in set phrases such as dō itashimashite (you're welcome) and itadakimasu (いただきます - a phrase, derived from the polite keigo form of "to eat," said before eating or drinking). Similar to respect language, verbs can also change their form by adding a prefix and the verb "suru" or "itasu". For example, motsu (carry) becomes o mochi shimasu. This has an implication of doing something for the other person; thus a Japanese person might offer to carry something for someone else by saying o mochi shimasu. This form also appears in the set phrase o matase shimashita, "I am sorry to have kept you waiting," from matsu (wait) and o negai shimasu, "Please do this", from negau, (request or hope for). Even more politely, the form motasete itadaku literally means "humbly be allowed to carry." In humble language, name suffixes are dropped, hence when referring to oneself, one does not use the suffix san. Similarly, when referring to people from inside one's group, one drops the suffixes. Similarly to respectful language, nouns can also change. The word hito, 人, meaning person, becomes mono, written 者. The humble version is used when referring to oneself or members of one's group, such as one's company.

Respectful verbs

:¹ The distinction between these three verbs is lost in some respectful forms. :² いただく itadaku is actually the humble form of receive (貰う morau); it can also be related verbs like drink (飲む nomu).

Usage

Business

Honorifics are considered extremely important in a business setting. Training in honorifics usually does not take place at school or university, so company trainees are trained in correct use of honorifics to customers and superiors. Keigo is used when attendants speak to a customer (even in the supermarket and on trains), in formal business meetings, by women in jidaigeki (in all situations) and by educated people in general.

In groups and out groups

When using polite or respectful forms, the point of view of the speaker is shared by the speaker's in-group (内 uchi), so in-group referrents do not take honorifics. For example, members of one's own company are referred to with humble forms when speaking with an external person; similarly, family members of the speaker are referred to humbly when speaking to guests. Similarly, the out-group (外 soto) addressee or referent is always mentioned in the polite style (though not necessarily with honorifics). Mastery of politeness and honorifics is important for functioning in Japanese society. Not speaking politely enough can be insulting, and speaking too politely can be distancing (and therefore also insulting) or seem sarcastic. Children generally speak using plain informal speech, but they are expected to master politeness and honorifics by the end of their teenage years. Recent trends indicate that the importance of proper politeness is not as high as before, particularly in metropolitan areas. The standards are inconsistently applied towards foreigners, though it is generally recommended for adult Japanese learners to master the polite style before attempting the others.

Gender differences

Depending on the situation, women's speech may contain more honorifics than men's. In particular, in informal settings, women are more likely to use polite vocabulary and honorific prefixes, such as gohan o taberu for "eat cooked rice", whereas men may use less polite vocabulary such as meshi o kuu for exactly the same meaning. This is part of a general pattern of difference in speech by gender. However, in many settings, such as customer service, there will be little or no difference between male and female speech. See also Gender differences in spoken Japanese.

Grammatical overview

Japanese has grammatical functions to express several different emotions. Not only politeness but also respectfulness, humility and formality can be expressed.

Expressing politeness

There are two levels of politeness, plain (常体 jōtai), distal or polite (敬体 keitai or 丁寧 teinei), and formal. Formal and polite can be combined. For example, for the sentence "This is a book", The informal style is used among friends, the distal or polite style by inferiors when addressing superiors and among strangers or casual acquaintances, and the formal style generally in writing or prepared speeches. The plain formal and informal styles of verbs are identical, with the exception of the verb de aru used as a copula. However, formal language in Japanese uses different vocabularly and structures from informal language. For example, formal language uses many two-kanji Chinese derived words conjugated with suru, and substitutes highly formal vocabularly such as joshi for josei (woman)

Expressing respect

Further to this, there is another factor, respect, which is indicated in yet other ways. For each politeness level there are two respectful forms (敬語 keigo). #The respect language (尊敬語 sonkeigo) form shows respect to the subject of the sentence. #The humble language (謙譲語 kenjōgo) form gives respect to the (direct or indirect) object by a variety of means, the most common being to humble the speaker. These respectful forms are represented by different verb endings. Since verbs come at the end of the sentence in Japanese, most of the factors formality, politeness, and respect is expressed at the very end of each sentence. The omachisuru humble forms carry an implication that the waiting or other activity is being (humbly) done by the speaker for the benefit of the person being addressed. Thus a humble sentence is unlikely to take a third person subject. For example, a sentence like jon ga sensei wo o machi suru (John waits for the teacher) is unlikely to occur.

Combining respect and politeness

Since respect is on a different axis from politeness, it is possible to form a style matrix. Consider the verb to wait (待つ matsu) :¹ The passive form of the verb often plays this role. Differences in politeness and respect are sometimes indicated by selecting different words, though the pattern is irregular. The following are a few examples: :¹ 私 (wata(ku)shi), being the general first-person pronoun, is also used by females.

Honorific titles

See Japanese titles.

Requests

Japanese requests and commands have many set forms depending on who is being addressed by whom. For example, the phrase yoroshiku o negai shimasu, meaning "I ask you for favour" can take various forms. At the bottom of the scale comes :yoroshiku tanomu, which might be used between male friends. Its more polite varient :yoroshiku tanomimasu might be used towards less familiar people or to superiors. Going up in politeness, the phrase :yoroshiku onegai shimasu means the same thing, but is used in business settings. It is possible to go further, replacing the polite "shimasu" with the humble itashimasu, to get :yoroshiku onegai itashimasu. In extremely formal Japanese, such as that used on New Year's greeting cards, this may be replaced with an even more polite expression :yoroshiku onegai mōshiagemasu. When making requests, at the bottom of the politeness scale comes the plain imperative tabero or kue, literally "Eat!", a simple order to be said to an inferior or someone considered to have no choice, such as a prisoner. This form might convey anger. Similarly, the "no da" suffix can make an order: taberu n da, or kuu n da "Eat!". To express anger, the suffix yagaru also exists: "kuiyagare", an extremely forceful and angry instruction to eat, expressing contempt for the addressee. Negatives are formed by adding suffix na: taberu na "do not eat", gomi o suteru na: "do not throw away rubbish". Similarly, the negative of da, ja nai can be used: taberu n ja nai. More polite, but still strict, is the nasai suffix, which attaches to the i-form of the verb. This originates in the polite verb nasaru. Tabenasai thus is an order perhaps given by a parent to a child. This is often colloquially shortened to na, hence tabena. This form has no grammatical negative. Requests can also be formed by adding to the "te" form of a verb. The plainest form adds kure, an irregular form of the verb kureru, to the te form. For example tabete kure or kutte kure: "eat it", less forceful than "tabero". Negatives are made by negating the "te" form: tabenaide kure or kuwanaide kure "don't eat it". Going up one scale in politeness, the more polite verb kudasai is added. For example tabete kudasai. With this polite form, the rough kuu verb is unlikely to be used. Similarly, tabenaide kudasai: "please don't eat it". A similar entry on the scale of politeness is made by using the imperative form of a polite verb. For example, meshiagaru, the polite verb for "to eat", when turned into meshiagare, the imperative, becomes the response to the set phrase itadakimasu. Further, more polite forms are also possible. These involve the "i-form" of the verb rather than the "te form", and an honorific prefix. For example, tsukau, "use", becomes o tsukai kudasai: "please use this". More politeness can also involve indirection of the request: kore o tsukau you ni o negai shimasu: "I humbly request that you think about using this".

Honorific prefixes

O- and go- are honorific prefixes which are applied to nouns and sometimes to verbs. In general, go- precedes Sino-Japanese words (that is, words borrowed from Chinese or made from Sino-Japanese elements), while o- precedes native Japanese words. There are exceptions, however, such as the Sino-Japanese word for telephone (denwa), which takes the honorific prefix o-. Although these honorific prefixes are often translated into English as "honorable" ("o-denwa," for example, would be given as "the honorable telephone") this translation is unwieldy and cannot convey the true feeling of their use in Japanese. These prefixes are essentially untranslatable, but their use indicates a polite respect for the item named or the person to or about whom one is speaking. There are some words which frequently or always take these prefixes, regardless of who is speaking and to whom; these are often ordinary items which may have particular cultural significance, such as tea (o-cha) and rice (go-han). The word meshi, the Japanese equivalent of Sino-Japanese go-han, is considered unattractive. Honorific prefixes can be used for other items, possibly for a comic or sarcastic effect (for example, o-kokakōra, "honorable Coca-Cola"). Overuse of honorific prefixes may be taken as pretentious or simpering. In tea ceremony, common ingredients and equipment always take the honorific o- or go-, including water (o-mizu), hot water (o-yu), and tea bowls (o-chawan). However, these terms are often heard in daily life as well. As with honorific word forms and titles, honorific prefixes are used when referring to or speaking with a social superior, or speaking about a superior's actions or possessions, but not usually when referring to oneself or one's own actions or possessions, or those of one's in-group. For example, when referring to one's own order at a restaurant, one would use Chūmon, but when referring to a customer's order, the restaurant staff would use go-chūmon. Similarly, kazoku means "my family," while go-kazoku means "your family" (or, broadly speaking, someone else's family). Foreign loanwords (except those that come from Chinese; see above) seldom take honorifics, but when they do o- seems to be preferable to go-. Examples are o-biiru (biiru: beer), which can sometimes be heard at restaurants, o-kaado (kaado: card, as in credit card or point card), which is often heard at supermarkets and department stores, and o-soosu (honorable sauce). O- was also commonly used as an element in female names in pre-war Japan. For example O-hana (お花), O-haru (お春), and so on. This was a less polite honorific than "san". For example, a female servant, Haruko would be referred to as O-haru rather than Haruko-san. This usage has disappeared in current Japanese.

External links

- [http://www.jlpt-kanji.com/keigo.php Keigo Examples]
- [http://www.jekai.org/entries/aa/00/no/aa00no31.htm jeKai article on keigo] ja:敬語

Japanese pitch accent

Japanese pitch accent is a feature of the Japanese language. It is lexically distinct in most dialects, though the position of the accent for a given word may vary among them. For instance, standard (Tokyo) Japanese for "now" is I-ma, with accent on the first syllable, but the Kansai dialect has i-MA instead. The accent rules in standard Japanese (hyōjungo) are presented here as an example: # If the accent is on the first mora, then the pitch starts high and drops suddenly at the second mora, then goes down more slowly. Nevertheless, Japanese speakers hear the first mora as special. # If the accent is on a mora other than the first or the last, then the pitch rises gradually until the mora after the accented one, and there goes down suddenly. A native speaker will hear the accented vowel as higher than the rest, even though the maximum pitch is actually in the next mora. # If the word doesn't have an accent, the pitch rises continuously from a low at the start of the word to a high at its end, just like French. About 80% of all Japanese words belong to this class, and the Japanese describe their sound as "flat" (heiban, 平板) or "accentless". The foregoing description is based on speech analysis. In most guides, however, accent is presented using the "two-pitch-level theory". In this, each Japanese mora is either high or low in pitch. In the two-pitch-level theory, # if the accent is on the first mora, then the first syllable is high-pitched and the others are low: H-L, H-L-L, etc., # if the accent is on a mora other than the first, then the first mora is low, the following moras are high, up to and including the accented one, and the rest of the moras are low: L-H, L-H-L, L-H-H-L, L-H-H, etc., and # if the word doesn't have an accent, the first mora is low and the others are high. This spreads to grammatical particles, usually unaccented, that may attach to the end of the word. A word such as o-mo-shi-RO-i, which has the accent on the fourth, is pronounced with a gradually rising pitch from the beginning until the middle of the fifth syllable, then the pitch drops suddenly. In poetry, o-mo-shi-ro-i would be pronounced in five beats (morae), with the tone very gradually rising during the first four, then dropping suddenly at the i. Outside poetry, though, the last two morae of omoshiroi get slurred into a diphthong, rhyming with "boy" and pronounced with a descending tone. Some linguists have yet another view of accent. In this view, a word either has an "accent kernel" or it does not. If it does, the pitch drops on the mora after the accented one; if it does not, the pitch remains (more or less) constant throughout the length of the word. The initial rise in the pitch of the word is not due to lexical accent, but rather to phrasal accent: if the first word in a phrase does not have accent on the first mora, then it is pronounced with a low pitch, and the following mora is pronounced with a high pitch. Each "accent kernel" triggers another drop in pitch, and this accounts for the gradual drop in pitch throughout a phrase.

Correct pitch accent

Correct pitch accent is considered essential in some jobs in Japan, such as announcement and television presentation. The current standards for pitch accent are presented in special accent dictionaries for native speakers such as the Shin Meikai Akusento Jiten. Newsreaders and other speech professionals are required to follow these standards. What is defined as correct is generally the pitch accent of the Tokyo dialect. The pitch accent varies a great deal in Japanese dialects. Foreign learners of Japanese are sometimes taught to use accents. Incorrect pitch accent is a strong characteristic of a "foreign accent" in Japanese. However, incorrect pitch accent only rarely leads to comprehension difficulties.

Examples of words which differ only in pitch

These examples are in standard (Tokyo) Japanese. The pitch accent is indicated with the phonetic symbol for downstep, , which it resembles.

External links

- [http://sp.cis.iwate-u.ac.jp/sp/lesson/j/doc/accent.html Japanese word accent speech analysis]

Bibliography

- Akamatsu, Tsutomu. (1997). Japanese phonetics: Theory and practice. München: LINCOM EUROPA.
- Bloch, Bernard. (1950). Studies in colloquial Japanese IV: Phonemics. Language, 26, 86-125.
- Haraguchi, Shosuke. (1977). The tone pattern of Japanese: An autosegmental theory of tonology. Tokyo: Kaitakusha.
- Haraguchi, Shosuke. (1999). Accent. In N. Tsujimura (Ed.), The handbook of Japanese linguistics (Chap. 1, p. 1-30). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-631-20504-7.
- Kindaiichi, Haruhiko. (1995) , Sanseido, ISBN 438513457X.
- Kubozono, Haruo. (1999). Mora and syllable. In N. Tsujimura (Ed.), The handbook of Japanese linguistics (Chap. 2, pp. 31-61). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
- Martin, Samuel E. (1975). A reference grammar of Japanese. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- McCawley, James D. (1968). The phonological component of a grammar of Japanese. The Hague: Mouton.
- Shibatani, Masayoshi. (1990). The languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Vance, Timothy. (1987). An introduction to Japanese phonology. Albany: State University of New York Press. Pitch accent

Chinese character

] Chinese characters or Han characters () are logograms used in the written forms of the Chinese language, and to varying degrees in the Japanese and Korean. Use of Chinese characters has disappeared from the Vietnamese language — in which they were used until the 20th century — and from Korea, where in normal writing they have been completely replaced by Hangul. Contrary to popular belief, only a small number of Chinese characters are pictograms. Most characters are based on other characters that were homonyms when the character was created. Chinese characters are called hànzì in Mandarin Chinese, kanji in Japanese, hanja or hanmun in Korean, and hán tự or chữ nho in Vietnamese. In modern written Chinese, characters are written either in Traditional Chinese characters (used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau) or Simplified Chinese characters (used in Mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore) In Chinese, a word or phrase (词 / 詞 cí) (a unit of meaning) is composed of one or more characters (字 zì), for instance the phrase 汉字 / 漢字 hànzì is composed by two characters. Each Chinese character represents a single syllabic unit in all spoken variants of Chinese still existing today. However, unlike modern Chinese dialects, Archaic Chinese had consonant clusters and lacked a tonal feature, for example 角 jiǎo is pronounced klak in Archaic Chinese. Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese are not linguistically related to Chinese, and in order to make Chinese characters work in those languages with radically different grammar, many adaptations had to be made. For example, Japanese kanji are used to represent not only borrowings from Chinese, which are monosyllabic, but also native words (Kun'yomi), which are often multisyllabic. In many cases in these languages, there are differences from characters used in Chinese. Japanese has standardised on a set of 1,945 characters, known as the Jōyō kanji, which includes simplified or variant forms of characters traditionally used in China, as well as a number of Chinese characters created by the Japanese themselves. In China itself, thousands of simplified characters were created and adopted in Mainland China between 1956 and 1964 to eradicate mass illiteracies. This created major distinctions between the two sets of characters. (For example, 汉 in simplified characters used in Mainland China and Singapore, and 漢 in traditional characters used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.) Just as Roman letters have a characteristic shape (lower-case letters occupying a roundish area, with ascenders or descenders on some letters), Chinese characters tend to occupy a more-or-less square area. Characters made up of multiple parts squash these parts together in order to maintain a uniform size and shape. Because of this, beginners often practise on squared or graph paper, and the Chinese sometimes call Han characters "square characters". Roman letter

Origin

The oldest Chinese inscriptions that are clearly writing are the poorly understood Oracle Script (甲骨文 jiǎgǔwén) of the late Shang Dynasty (or Yin (殷) Dynasty), attested from about 1200 BC. Only about 1400 of the 2500 known Oracle Script glyphs can be identified with later Chinese characters and can therefore be easily read. There have been suggestions that this was not designed for the Chinese language, or even for a Sino-Tibetan language, because it does not seem to reflect Chinese morphology accurately. An analogy would be if English were written with a script that had a single character for die and kill, but two separate characters for warm in "it's a warm day" and "please warm the bath". Although the succeeding Zhou Dynasty was clearly Han Chinese, it's not clear which ethnic group the Shang were. One possibility is Miao (苗 Miáo). The first recorded Miao kingdom was Jiuli. The ancestors of the Jiuli are thought to be the Liangzhu people, and it is these who are credited with creating the Oracle Script. According to Chinese legend, Jiuli was defeated by the military unification of Huang Di (黃帝 Huángdì) and Yandi, leaders of the Huaxia (華夏 Huáxià) tribe (the ancestors of the Han Chinese) as they struggled for supremacy of the Huang He valley. After their defeat, the Jiuli people who were not absorbed into the new Zhou state moved south, splitting into the Miao and the Li (黎 Lí) peoples. The Yi script is quite old and is superficially similar to Chinese, but does not seem to be derived from it. It was perhaps inspired by the example of Chinese, but the possibility cannot be discounted that it and the Chinese script both descend from a common source such as the Oracle Script.

Styles

Yi script]] The earliest Chinese characters are the so called Oracle Script of the late Shang Dynasty, followed by the Bronzeware Script or (金文) jīnwén during the Zhou Dynasty. These scripts no longer serve as anything but a source for scholars. The first script that is still in (restricted) use today is the "Seal Script" or 篆書[篆书] zhuànshū. It is the result of the efforts of the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, in the standardization of the Chinese script. The Seal Script, as the name suggests, is now only used in artistic seals. Few people are still able to read the seal script, although the art of carving a traditional seal in the seal script remains alive in China today. Scripts that are still used regularly for print are the "Clerk Script" or 隸書[隶书] lìshū, the "Wei Monumental" or 魏碑 wèibēi, the "Regular Script" or 楷書[楷书] kǎishū, the "Song Style" or 宋體[宋体] sòngtǐ (mainly used in printing and computer fonts), and the "Running Script" or 行書[行书] xíngshū. Modern Chinese handwriting is usually modeled on the Running Script. Finally, there is the "Draft Script" (also called "Grass Script"), or 草書[草书] cǎoshū. The draft script is an idealized calligraphic style, where characters are suggested rather than realized. Despite being cursive to the point where individual strokes are no longer differentiable, the draft script is highly revered for the beauty and freedom that it embodies. Many simplified Chinese characters are based on this style.

Radicals

Draft Script]] Main article: radical Each character has a fundamental component, or radical (部首 bù shǒu, literally "initial portion"), and this design principle is used in Chinese dictionaries to logically order characters in sets. Full characters are ordered according to their initial radical, which fall into roughly 200 types. Then these are subcategorised by their total number of strokes.

Classification

See also: Chinese character classification Chinese scholars have traditionally classified Han characters into six types by etymology (六书). The first two types are single-body (独体), which means that the character was created independent of other Chinese characters preceding it. The first type, and the type most often associated with Chinese writing, are pictograms(象形字), which are pictorial representations of the morpheme represented. The second type are ideograms(指事字) that attempt to graphicalize abstract concepts, such as "up" (上) and "down" (下). Also considered ideograms are pictograms with an ideographic indicator; for instance, 刀 is a pictogram meaning "knife", while 刃 is an ideogram meaning "blade". Although the perception of most Westerners is that these are how most characters are created, pictograms and ideograms actually take up but a small proportion of Chinese logograms. logogram The next two types are called combined-body (合体), or compounds which means that the character was created from assembling other characters together. Note that despite being called "compounds", these logograms are single entities in themselves; they are written so that they take up the same amount of space as any other logogram. The third type of characters are radical-radical compounds(會意字), in which each element (radical) of the character hints at the meaning. The fourth type is of radical-phonetic compounds(形聲字), in which one component (the radical) indicates the kind of concept the character describes, and the other hints at the pronunciation. This last type accounts for the majority of Chinese logograms. The final two types are rarer. Changed-annotation characters (转注字) are characters which were originally the same character but have bifurcated through orthographic (and often linguistic) drift. For instance, 考 and 老 were once the same character, meaning "elder person", but 考 now means "test" and 老 means "old". Fake-borrowed characters (假借字) are created when a native spoken word has no corresponding character, and therefore another character with the same or similar sound (and often a vaguely similar meaning) is "borrowed" to represent the new word. Occasionally the new meaning can supplant the old meaning. For instance, the character 自 used to be a pictographic word meaning "nose", but was borrowed to mean "self" -- and is now known almost exclusively as "self". However, the "nose" meaning survives in compounds. Note that Japanese Kana can all be considered to be of this type, hence the name "kana" (仮名, where 仮 is a simplified form of 假). Note that due to the long period of language evolution, such component "hints" within characters are often useless and sometimes quite misleading in modern usage. This is particularly true in non-Chinese languages. Classification has its own problems, as the origins of characters are often obscure. For example, the character for "East" (東; dōng), which combines the "tree" radical (木) and the "sun" radical (日), is usually considered a radical-radical compound. Though it appears to represent a sun rising through trees, and this is both an evocative image and a useful mnemonic, the origin and classification of the character are disputed among scholars. While some agree with the radical-radical classification, others see it as a unique character in and of itself — some claim it as being derived from an early pictograph of bundled sticks. As another example, the character for "mother" (媽 mā) consists of one component meaning "female" (女) and another one meaning "horse" (馬 mǎ). The first component denotes a female entity, whereas the second suggests the pronunciation by referring to the word for "horse". The reason that "horse" was chosen to represent mother may be that horses — in a historical context — were often used to represent "steadfastness". The majority of Chinese characters, like this example, have one component that suggests the meaning and another that suggests pronunciation. In many cases, even the component intended to suggest pronunciation has an abstract semantic relation to the idea expressed by the character. This is possible because the phonetic system of Chinese allows for many words to have the same pronunciation (homonymy), and because the consideration of phonetic similarity used in a character generally ignores its tone and the manner of articulation of its initial consonant (but not the place of articulation).

Orthography

Usually Chinese characters each take up the same amount of space. One of the easiest ways for beginners to ensure this is with a grid as guidance. In addition to strictness in the amount of space a character takes up, Chinese characters are written with very precise rules. The three most important rules are the strokes employed, the stroke placement, and the order with which they are written (see Stroke order). Most words can be written with just one stroke order, though some words also have variant stroke orders, which may result in different stroke counts. On a larger scale, Chinese text is traditionally written from top to bottom and then right to left, but it is more common today to see the same orientation as Western languages: going from left to right and then top to bottom. Most punctuation marks were adopted from the West, but there are a few exceptions: for example, names of books are marked with a wavy line drawn to their right in vertical text, or enclosed in a special double pointed bracket in horizontal text. Common errors while writing Chinese characters include incorrect stroke direction, incorrect stroke order, incorrect stroke length relative to other strokes, and incorrect placement of strokes relative to other strokes. Each mistake is highly visible to the literate eye due to the imperfections of the human fingers, as well as the weight given to the different parts of a stroke. Mistakes are often shunned, as they are marks of illiteracy or incompetence. In a culture that values scholarship as its highest virtue, such attributions are highly undesirable. Because of this strictness in not only the image of the character, but how the image is produced, it is considered by many the most difficult to learn properly. Due to the long history of China, as well as many stylistic variations that have developed and the many attempts by past rulers to standardize writing, some characters have multiple forms. The characters themselves can be considered separate, but often are merely derivatives of each other in that their composition is of the same root. They are often not considered simplifications, as their stroke count is sometimes the same, and often lessened only but a slight amount. The most famous today is probably the character for sword (劍), where the radical (on the right) is knife (刀). The same word can be written with different forms for the radical, including using 刃 or 刀 itself. The usage of traditional characters versus simplified characters varies greatly, and can depend on both the local customs and the medium. Often, simplified characters would be used in everyday writing, or quick scribblings, while traditional characters would be used in printed works. Since the 1950's, the PRC's has officially adopted a simplified script, while Hong Kong, Macau, and the Republic of China retain the use of traditional. There is no absolute rule for using either system, and often, it is determined by what the target audience understands, as well as the upbringing of the writer. In addition there is a special system of characters used for writing numerals in financial contexts; these characters are deliberately chosen to be complicated, to prevent forgeries or alterations.

Reforms

:Main articles: Simplified Chinese character, Kanji Although associated with the People's Republic of China (PRC), character simplification predates 1949. Cursive written text almost always includes character simplification. Simplified forms used in print have always existed. In the 1930s and 1940s, discussions on character simplification took place within the Kuomintang government, and a large number of Chinese intellectuals and writers have long maintained that character simplification would help boost literacy in China. The People's Republic of China issued its first round of official character simplifications in two documents, the first in 1956 and the second in 1964. A second round of character simplifications (known as erjian, or "Second round simplified characters", were promulgated in 1977. It was poorly received, and in 1986 the authorities retracted the second round completely, and also made six revisions to the first round of simplified characters (including the restoration of three characters that had been simplified in the First Round: 叠, 覆, 像). Singapore underwent three successive rounds of character simplification. The last round, in 1976, arrived at the same set of simplified characters as Mainland China. Malaysia promulgated a set of Simplified characters in 1981, which were also completely identical to the simplified characters used in Mainland China. In 1946, following World War II, the Japanese government also instituted a series of orthographic reforms. Some characters were given simplified forms called 新字体 (shinjitai). The number of characters in circulation was reduced, and formal lists of characters to be learned during each grade of school were established. Many variant forms of characters and obscure alternatives for common characters were officially discouraged. This was done with the goal of facilitating learning for children and simplifying kanji use in literature and periodicals. These are simply guidelines, so many characters outside these standards are still widely known and commonly used.

Dictionaries

The design and use of a dictionary of Chinese characters presents interesting problems. Dozens of indexing schemes have been created for the Chinese characters. The great majority of these schemes — beloved by their inventors but nobody else — have appeared in only a single dictionary; only one such system has achieved truly widespread use. This is the system of radicals. Chinese character dictionaries often allow users to locate entries in several different ways. Many Chinese, Japanese, and Korean dictionaries of Chinese characters list characters in radical order: characters are grouped together by radical, and radicals containing fewer strokes come before radicals containing more strokes. Under each radical, characters are listed by their total number of strokes. In Japanese and Korean dictionaries, it is usually possible to search for characters by sound, using Kana and Hangul. Most dictionaries also allow searches by total number of strokes, and individual dictionaries often allow other search methods as well. For instance, to look up the character 松 (pine tree) in a typical dictionary, the user first determines which part of the character is the radical, then counts the number of strokes in the radical (in this case four), and turns to the radical index (usually located on the inside front or back cover of the dictionary). Under the number 4, the user locates the radical 木, then turns to the page number listed, which is the start of the listing of all the characters containing this radical. This page will have a sub-index giving stroke numbers and page numbers. The right half of the character also contains four strokes, so the user locates the number 4, and turns to the page number given. From there, the user must scan the entries to locate the character he or she is seeking. Some dictionaries have a sub-index which lists every character containing each radical, so that if the user knows the number of strokes in the non-radical portion of the character, he or she can locate the correct page number directly. Another popular dictionary system is the four corner method, where characters are classified according to the "shape" of each of the four corners. Most Chinese-English dictionaries and Chinese dictionaries sold to English speakers use the radical lookup method combined with an alphabetical listing of characters based on their pinyin romanization system. To use one of these dictionaries, the reader finds the radical and stroke number of the character, as before, and locates the character in the radical index. The character's entry will have the character's pronunciation in pinyin written down; the reader then turns to the main dictionary section and looks up the pinyin spelling alphabetically, just as if it were an English dictionary.

Derivatives of Han characters

Besides Korean and Japanese, a number of Asian languages have historically been written with Han characters, or with characters modified from Han characters. They include:
- Khitan language (:ja:契丹文字)
- Miao language
- Nakhi language (Geba script)
- Tangut language (:fr:Tangoute, :zh:西夏文, [http://www.cflac.org.cn/chinaartnews/2003-10/08/content_1024511.htm], [http://www.huaxia.com/ssjn/smxx/00197002.html])
- Vietnamese language (Chữ nôm)
- Zhuang language The Jurchen language (:ja:女真文字) used a ideographic script consisted of original characters with a few Han borrowings. In addition, the Yi script is similar to Han, but is not known to be directly related to it.

Number of Chinese characters

The question of how many characters there are is still the subject of debate. In the 18th century, European scholars claimed the total tally to be about 80,000. This number, however, is thought to be exaggerated as the character count varies by dictionary and its comprehensiveness. For example, the Kangxi Dictionary lists about 40,000 characters, while the modern Zhonghua Zihai lists in excess of 80,000. One reason for the overwhelming number of characters is due to the existence of rarely-occurring variant and obscure characters (many of which are unused, even in Classical Chinese). Note, however, that no two characters are ever contextually identical. The large number of Chinese characters is due to their logographic nature — for every morpheme there must be a symbol, and sometimes there are variant characters have developed for the same morpheme. It has also been claimed that the sheer number of characters is used as a way to separate scholars from the ordinary, and perhaps even to keep certain texts from being read by all but the most scholarly.

Chinese

It is usually said that about 3,000 characters are needed for basic literacy in Chinese (for example, to read a Chinese newspaper), and a well-educated person will know well in excess of 4,000 to 5,000 characters. Note that it is not necessary to know a character for every known word of Chinese, as the majority of modern Chinese words are compounds made of two or more morphemes, and are thus written not with a single unique character, but with multiple, usually common, characters. There are 6763 code points in GB2312, an early version of the national standard used in the People's Republic of China. GB18030 has a much higher number. The Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi proficiency test covers approximately 5000 hanzi. There are 4808 characters in Taiwanese Ministry of Education's list of regularly used Chinese characters. (常用國字標準字體表) The Chinese Standard Interchange Code (CNS11643) - the official national standard - supports 48027 characters, while the most widely-used encoding scheme, BIG-5, supports only 13053. In addition, there are a large number of dialect characters which are not used in formal Chinese written language, but are used to represent colloquial terms in non-Mandarin Chinese spoken forms..

Japanese

In Japanese there are 1945 "daily use kanji" (常用漢字 jōyō kanji) designated by the Japanese Ministry of Education. These are taught during primary and secondary school. Publications which include characters which fall outside this list should print furigana or rubi alongside the characters as a phonetic guide, however such guidance is often omitted for those characters that many are familiar with. Upon formalization of the daily-use kanji, government offices and newspapers were encouraged to abandon all other characters. This created an immediate problem with placenames and personal names which are not on the list and yet had been used in localities and families for hundreds of years. As a result, map production and birth registration processes were impeded. To resolve this issue, the government drew up a list of approximately one thousand additional characters, referred to as "name kanji" (jinmeiyō kanji 人名用漢字) used in personal and geographical names. For further information, see the Names section of the main Kanji article. This brought the total number of government-supported characters to 2928. There is some speculation that many of the "odd" kanji on the names list were promoted in an attempt to make a de-facto expansion of the Jouyou Kanji List, rather than with the serious idea that anyone will use them in names. The idea of reducing the number of kanji in use has been a politically contentious issue, with many conservatives believing that kanji are culturally Japanese and that people should use them frequently. Today, a well-educated Japanese person may know upwards of 3500 kanji. The Kanji kentei (日本漢字能力検定試験 Nihon kanji nōryoku kentei shiken or Test of Japanese Kanji Aptitude) tests the ability to read and write kanji. The highest level of the Kanji kentei tests the ability to read and write 6000 kanji, though in practice few people attain this level as Japanese language generally uses fewer Chinese characters than Chinese does, and literacy in Japanese requires knowledge of fewer Chinese characters than literacy in Chinese.

Korean

In Korea, Chinese characters (Hanja - 한자) have become a politically contentious issue, with some Koreans urging a "purification" of the national language and culture by total abandonment of their use. These individuals encourage the exclusive use of the native alphabet (Hangul) throughout Korean society and the end to character education in public schools. In South Korea, educational policy on characters has swung back and forth, often swayed by the then-current minister's personal opinion. At times, middle and high school students have been formally exposed to 1,800 to 2,000 basic characters, however this education is focused principally on recognition, with the evident purpose of making the society newspaper-literate. Thus, compared to a Japanese high school graduate, at best a young adult Korean may be unable to write more than several hundred of the simplest and most common characters. On the other hand, Korean adults who were teenagers under anti-character education ministers, may be approaching the status of functional illiteracy in terms of character production and recognition. There is a clear evolution toward the exclusive use of Hangul in day-to-day South Korean society. Hanja are still used to some extent, particularly in newspapers, weddings, place names and calligraphy. Hanja is also extensively used in situations where ambiguity must be avoided, such as high-level corporate reports government documents, and newspapers. The issue of ambiguity is the main hurdle in any effort to "cleanse" the Korean language of Chinese characters. Characters convey meaning visually, while alphabets convey guidance to pronunciation, which in turn gives guidance to meaning. As an example, in Korean dictionaries, the alphabetical text for the sound "gisa" yields more than 30 different entries. In the past, this ambiguity has been efficiently resolved by parenthetically displaying the associated characters. In North Korea, the government, wielding much tighter control than its sister government to the south, has banned Chinese characters from virtually all public displays and media, and forced the use of Hangul in their place.

Vietnamese

Although now nearly extinct in Vietnamese, varying scripts of Chinese characters were used to write the language, with use of Chinese characters becoming limited to ceremonial uses beginning in the 19th century. Similarly to Japan and Korea, Chinese was used by the ruling classes, and the characters were eventually adopted to write Vietnamese. To express native Vietnamese words which had different pronunciations than the Chinese, Vietnamese developed the Chu Nom script which added diacritical marks to distinguish native (Vietnamese) words from Chinese.

Rare and complex characters

Chu Nom Chu Nom Chu Nom Often a character which is not commonly used (called "rare" or "variant" characters) will appear in a personal or place name in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean names (see Chinese name, Japanese name, and Korean name respectively). This has caused problems as many computer encoding systems include only the 5,000 or so most common characters and exclude the less often used characters. This is especially a problem for personal names which often contain rare or classical characters. People who have run into this problem include Taiwanese politicians Wang Chien-shien (王建煊) and Yu Shyi-kun (游錫堃) and Taiwanese singer David Tao (陶喆). Newspapers have dealt with this problem in varying ways, including trying to create a character from two characters, including a picture, or, especially as is the case with Yu Shyi-kun, simply omitting the rare character with the hope that the reader will be able to infer who it refers to. Japanese newspapers may render such names and words in katakana instead of kanji, and it is common practice for people to write names for which they are unsure of the correct kanji in katakana instead. There are also some extremely complex characters which have understandably become rather rare. According to Bellassen (1989), the most complex Chinese character is zhé (if the character is not rendered on your browser, refer to the image to the right instead), meaning "verbose" and boasting sixty-four strokes; although it fell from use around the fifth century AD. It might be argued, however, that while boasting the most strokes, it is not necessarily the most complex (in terms of difficulty) character, as it simply requires writing the same sixteen-stroke character four times (albeit in the space alloted for one). An 84-stroke kokuji (Japanese-created kanji) also exists [http://www.mojikyo.gr.jp/gif96/066/066147.gif] - composed of 3 clouds (雲) on top of 龘 (3 dragons; the appearance of a dragon walking), it has the kun-yomi odoto, taito and daito. The most complex character found in contemporary Chinese dictionaries is 齉 nàng , meaning "unclear pronouncing due to snuffle", with "just" thirty-six strokes. The most complex character still in use may be 'biáng', with 57 strokes, which refers to Biang Biang Noodles, a type of noodle from China's Shaanxi province. This character cannot be found in modern Chinese dictionaries. In contrast, the simplest character is 一 yī, "one", with just one stroke. The most common character is 的 de, a grammatical particle usually translatable as "of", with eight strokes. According to Bellassen (1989), the average number of strokes in a character is 9.8 (though it is unclear whether this average is weighted or includes traditional characters).

References

- Bellassen, Joël & Zhang Pengpeng (1989). Méthode d'Initiation à la Langue et à l'Écriture chinoises. La Compagnie. ISBN 2-9504135-1-X.

External links

- [http://www.landlubber.com/dec01/outcry.html A Typographic Outcry]: a curious perspective
- [http://www.zhongwen.com Chinese characters and culture]
- [http://www.chinaorbit.com/Chinese_Characters.871.0.html Articles about Chinese Characters]
- [http://www.mandarintools.com/chardict.html Chinese Character Dictionary]: Look up simplified and traditional characters by English definition, pinyin, Cantonese, and radical/stroke.
- [http://www.lorem-ipsum.info/_chinese Generator for Chinese typographical filler text]
- [http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm If English was written like Chinese]
- [http://www.chinese-school.netfirms.com/Chinese-symbols-customized.html Chinese Symbols] Introduction to Chinese Symbols
- [http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/visible/index.html Chinese]: a selection about Chinese characters from Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems, by John DeFrancis Category:Logographic writing systems Category:Writing Category:Chinese language ja:漢字 ko:한자

Kanji

:This article is about a form of writing; for the Australian shrub, see Kanji bush. Kanji (, literally "Han characters") is the name of Chinese characters in the Japanese language. Kanji are one of the three main forms of Japanese writing, the other two being hiragana and katakana, the kana. This article focuses on the Japanese use of these characters; see Chinese character for a general discussion of Chinese characters, which are also used in several other languages.

History

Chinese character There is some disagreement about how Chinese characters came to Japan, but it is generally accepted that Buddhist monks brought Chinese texts back to Japan in about the 5th century. These texts were in the Chinese language and would have been read as such at first. Over time, however, a system known as kanbun (漢文) emerged; it essentially used Chinese text with diacritical marks to allow Japanese speakers to read it in accordance with the rules of Japanese grammar. The Japanese language itself had no written form at the time. A writing system called man'yōgana (used in the ancient poetry anthology Man'yōshū) evolved that used a limited set of Chinese characters for their sound, rather than for their meaning. Man'yōgana written in curvilinear style became hiragana, a writing system that was accessible to women (who were denied higher education). Major works of Heian era literature by women were written in hiragana. Katakana emerged via a parallel path: monastery students simplified man'yōgana to a single constituent element. Thus the two other writing systems, hiragana and katakana, referred to collectively as kana, are actually forms of kanji. In modern Japanese, kanji is used to write parts of the language such as nouns, adjective stems and verb stems, while hiragana is used to write inflected verb and adjective endings (okurigana), particles, and words where the kanji is too difficult to read or remember. Katakana is used for representing onomatopoeia and non-Chinese loanwords. The usage of katakana to write loan words is a very recent phenomenon dating to after World War II. Originally loanwords were written using kanji, either used for their meaning (煙草 or 莨 tabako; "tobacco") or to spell the word phonetically (天婦羅 or 天麩羅 tempura). For example, many Japanese words of Portuguese origin borrowed from the 16th century onwards, have kanji forms.

Types of kanji: categorized by history

Kokuji

While some kanji and Chinese hanzi are mutually readable, many more are not. In addition to characters that have different meanings in Japanese, and characters that have identical meanings but are written differently, there are also characters peculiar to Japan known as kokuji (国字; literally "national characters"). Kokuji are also known as wasei kanji (和製漢字; lit. "Chinese characters made in Japan"). There are hundreds of kokuji (see the [http://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/kokuji-list.html sci.lang.japan AFAQ list]), and although some are rarely used, many others have become important additions to the written Japanese language. These include:
- 峠 tōge (mountain pass)
- 榊 sakaki (sakaki tree, genus Camellia)
- 畑 hatake (field of crops)
- 辻 tsuji (crossroads, street)
- 働 dō, hatara(ku) (work)

Kokkun

In addition to kokuji, there are kanji that have been given meanings in Japanese different from their original Chinese meanings. These kanji are not considered kokuji but are instead called kokkun (国訓) and include characters such as:
- 沖 oki (offing, open sea; Ch. chōng rinse)
- 森 mori (forest; Ch. sēn gloomy, majestic, luxuriant growth)
- 椿 tsubaki (Camellia japonicus; Ch. chūn Ailantus)

Old characters and new characters

The same kanji character can sometimes be written in two different ways, 旧字体 (kyū-jitai; lit. "old character") (舊字體 in kyū-jitai) and 新字体 (shin-jitai; "new character"). The following are some examples of kyū-jitai followed by the corresponding shin-jitai:
- 國国 kuni (country)
- 號号 gō (number)
- 變変 hen, ka(waru) (change) Kyū-jitai were used before the end of World War II, and are mostly, if not completely, the same as the Traditional Chinese characters. After the war the government introduced the simplified shin-jitai. Some of the new characters are similar to simplified characters used in the People's Republic of China. Also, like the simplification process in China, some of the shinjitai were once abbreviated forms (略字 ryakuji) used in handwriting, but in contrast with the "proper" unsimplified characters (正字 seiji) were only acceptable in colloquial contexts. This page [http://kan-chan.stbbs.net/word/ryakuji.html] shows examples of these handwritten abbreviations, identical to their modern shinjitai forms, from the postwar era. There are also handwritten simplifications today that are significantly simpler than their standard forms (either untouched or received only minor simplification in the post-war reforms), examples of which can be seen here [http://hac.cside.com/bunsho/1shou/39setu.html], but despite their wide usage and popularity, they, like their postwar counterparts, are not considered socially acceptable and are only used in handwriting. Some Chinese characters are only used phonetically in Japanese (当て字 ateji), and many Chinese characters are not used in Japanese at all. Theoretically, however, any Chinese character can also be a Japanese character—the Daikanwa Jiten, one of the largest dictionaries of kanji ever compiled, has about 50,000 entries, even though most of the entries have never been used in Japanese.

Readings

A kanji character may have several possible pronunciations, or "readings", depending on its context, intended meaning, use in compounds, and location in the sentence. Some common kanji have ten or more possible readings. These readings are categorized as either Chinese derived (on'yomi or on) or native (kun'yomi or kun).

On'yomi (Chinese reading)

The on'yomi (音読み), the Chinese reading, is a Japanese approximation of the Chinese pronunciation of the character at the time it was introduced. Some kanji were multiply introduced from different parts of China at different times, and so have multiple on'yomi, and often multiple meanings. The kanji invented in Japan typically have no on'yomi. For example, the kanji 込 is Japanese, in origin, and thus lacks any on'yomi. Generally, on'yomi are classified into four types:
- Go-on (呉音; literally Wu sound) readings, from the pronunciation of the Wu region (in the vicinity of modern Shanghai), during the 5th and 6th centuries.
- Kan-on (漢音; literally Han sound) readings, from the pronunciation during the Tang Dynasty in the 7th to 9th centuries, primarily from the standard speech of the capital, Chang'an.
- Tō-on (唐音；literally Tang sound) readings, from the pronunciations of later dynasties, such as the Song and Ming, covers all readings adopted from the Heian era to the Edo period
- Kan'yō-on (慣用音) readings, which are mistaken readings of the kanji which have become accepted into the language. Examples The most common form of readings is the kan-on one. The tō-on readings occur in some words such as isu "chair" or futon. The go-on readings are especially common in Buddhist terminology such as gokuraku 極楽 "paradise". Due to trade and navigation patterns, a great volume of Chinese vocabulary was introduced to Japan by natives of southern China, thus many common pronunciations more closely mirror those of Southern Chinese languages ("dialects") than Northern pronunciations. Chinese languages have changed over time and pronunciations used at the time of introduction of vocabulary from China to Japan may no longer be used in a recognizable form by contemporary Chinese. On'yomi are usually single-syllable readings, since each character expresses a single Chinese syllable. However, tonality aside, most Chinese syllables (especially in Middle Chinese, in which final stop consonants were more prevalent than in most modern dialects) did not fit the largely-CV (consonant-vowel) phonotactics of classical Japanese. Thus most on'yomi are composed of two moras (syllables or beats), the second of which is either a lengthening of the vowel in the first mora (this being i in the case of e and u in the case of o, due to linguistic drift in the centuries since), or one of the syllables ku, ki, tsu, chi, or syllabic n, chosen for their approximation to the final consonants of Middle Chinese. In fact, palatalized consonants before vowels other than i, as well as syllabic n, were probably added to Japanese to better simulate Chinese; none of these features occur in words of native Japanese origin. On'yomi primarily occur in multi-kanji compound words (熟語 jukugo), many of which are the result of the adoption (along with the kanji themselves) of Chinese words for concepts that either didn't exist in Japanese or could not be articulated as elegantly using native words. This borrowing process is often compared to the English borrowings from Latin and Norman French, since Chinese-borrowed terms are often more specialized, or considered to sound more erudite or formal, than their native counterparts. The major exception to this rule is surnames, in which the native kun'yomi reading is usually used (see below).

Kun'yomi (Japanese reading)

The kun'yomi (訓読み), Japanese reading, or somewhat misleadingly native reading, is a reading based on the pronunciation of a native Japanese word, or yamatokotoba, that closely approximated the meaning of the Chinese character when it was introduced. Again, there can be multiple kun readings for the same kanji, and some kanji have no kun'yomi at all. For instance, the kanji for east, 東, has the on reading tō. However, Japanese already had two words for east, higashi and azuma. Thus the kanji character 東 had the latter pronunciations added as kun'yomi. However, the kanji 寸, denoting a Chinese unit of measurement (slightly over an inch), had no native Japanese equivalent; thus it only has an on'yomi, sun. Kun'yomi are characterized by the strict (C)V syllable structure of yamatokotoba. Most noun or adjective kun'yomi are two to three syllables long, while verb kun'yomi are more often one or two syllables in length (not counting trailing hiragana called okurigana, although those are usually considered part of the reading). In a number of cases, multiple kanji were assigned to cover a single word. Typically when this occurs, the different kanji have different meanings. For instance, the word なおす, naosu, when written 治す, means "to heal an illness or sickness". When written 直す it means "to fix or correct something" (e.g. a bicycle or a badly written Wikipedia article). Sometimes the differences are very clear, other times they are quite subtle. Sometimes there are differences of opinion in different reference works -- one dictionary may say the kanji are equivalent, while another dictionary may draw distinctions of use between them. Because of this confusion, Japanese people have trouble knowing which kanji to use in some cases. One workaround is simply to write the word in hiragana, a method frequently employed with more complex cases such as もと moto, which has five different kanji, 元, 基, 本, 下, 素, three of which have only very subtle differences.

When to use which reading

Words for similar concepts, such as "east" (東), "north" (北) and "northeast" (東北), can have completely different pronunciations: the kun readings higashi and kita are used for the first two, while the on reading tōhoku is used for the third. To complicate the matter, there are two basic guidelines for determining the pronunciation of a particular kanji in a given context. First, and most simply, kanji occurring in compounds are usually read using on'yomi. These sorts of words are sometimes called jukugo (熟語). For example, 情報 jōhō "information", 学校 gakkō "school", and 新幹線 shinkansen "bullet train" all follow this pattern. Secondly, kanji occurring in isolation -- that is, written adjacent only to kana, not to other kanji -- are typically read using their kun'yomi. Together with their okurigana, if any, they generally function either as a noun or as an inflected adjective or verb: e.g. 月 tsuki "moon", 情け nasake "sympathy", 赤い akai "red" (adj), 新しい atarashii "new ", 見る miru "(to) see". Kanji compounds that also have okurigana, such as 空揚げ (also written 唐揚げ) karaage "fried food" and 折り紙 origami "artistic paper folding", also fall into this category. It should be noted, however, that many of the latter category of compounds can be written alternatively with the okurigana omitted (e.g. 空揚 or 折紙). There are numerous exceptions to both rules. 手紙 tegami "letter", 日傘 higasa "parasol", and the famous 神風 kamikaze "divine wind" all use kun'yomi despite being simple kanji compounds. Fortunately, most exceptions to the second rule are simple nouns: 愛 ai "love", 禅 Zen, 点 ten "mark, dot" -- most of these cases involve kanji that have no kun'yomi, so ther

Japanese language

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Learning Japanese

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Japanese honorifics

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Chinese character

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Number of Chinese characters

Chinese

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Rare and complex characters

See also

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Kanji

History

Types of kanji: categorized by history

Kokuji

Kokkun

Old characters and new characters

Readings

On'yomi (Chinese reading)

Kun'yomi (Japanese reading)

Other readings

When to use which reading