Japanese (Nihongo)

Origin of writing in Japan

Hiragana
Katakana
Kanji
Rmaji
The Japanese language
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Origin of writing in Japan

Before the 4th century AD, the Japanese had no writing system of
their own. During the 4th century they began to import and adapt the
Chinese script, along with many other aspects of Chinese culture,
probably via Korea.
At first the Japanese wrote in Classical Chinese or in a JapaneseChinese hybrid style. An example of the hybrid style is the kojiki
(Records of Antiquity) written in 712 AD. They then start to use
Chinese characters to write Japanese in a style known as man'ygana,
literarly "Ten Thousand leaf syllabic script", which used the characters
for their phonetic values.
Over time a writing system emerged in which Chinese characters were
used to write either words borrowed from Chinese or Japanese words
with the same or similar meanings. Chinese characters were also used
for their phonetic values to write grammatical elements and these
characters were simplified and eventually became two syllabic scripts,
hiragana and katakana.
Japanese literature reached a high point during the 11th century with
the Genji Monogatari (Tale of Genji) by Lady Murasaki Shikibu. Many
other Japanese literary works were also written by women.
Modern Japanese is written with a mixture of hiragana and
katakana, plus kanji. Modern Japanese texts may also include rmaji,
(Roman letters), the standard way of writing Japanese with the Latin
alphabet, eimoji (English script), non-Japanese words written in their
own script and various symbols known as kig.
Sample text in Japanese

Transliteration (rmaji)
Subete no ningen wa, umare nagara ni shite jiy de ari, katsu, songen
to kenri to ni tsuite byd de aru. Ningen wa, risei to ryshin o
sazukerareteari, tagai ni dh no seishin o motte kd shinakereba
naranai.
Translation
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They
are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one
another in a spirit of brotherhood.
(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Japanese Hiragana
Origin

Hiragana syllables developed from Chinese characters, as shown

below. Hiragana were originally called onnade or 'women's hand' as
were used mainly by women - men wrote in kanji and katakana. By
the 10th century, hiragana were used by everybody. The word
hiragana means "oridinary syllabic script".
In early versions of hiragana there were often many different
characters to represent the same syllable, however the system was
eventually simplified so that there was a one-to-one relationship
between spoken and written syllables. The present orthography of
hiragana was codified by the Japanese government in 1946.
The hiragana syllabary

In each column the rmaji appears on the left, the hiragana symbols in
the middle and the kanji from which they developed on the right.
There is some dispute about which kanji the hiragana developed from.

Huruf-huruf Hiragana (dasar)

The symbols for 'wi' and 'we' were made obsolete by the Japanese
Minsitry of Education in 1946 as part of its language reforms. The
symbols 'ha', 'he' and 'wo' are pronounced 'wa', 'e' and 'o' respectively
when used as grammatical particles.
Additional sounds are represented using diacritics or combinations of
syllables:

Characteristics and usage of hiragana

The hiragana syllabary consists of 48 syllables and is mainly used to

write word endings, known as okurigana in Japanese. Hiragana are
also widely used in materials for children, textbooks, animation and
comic books, to write Japanese words which are not normally written
with kanji, such as adverbs and some nouns and adjectives, or for
words whose kanji are obscure or obselete.
Hiragana are also sometimes written above or along side kanji to
indicate pronunciation, especially if the pronunication is obscure or
non-standard. Hiragana used in this way are known as furigana or
ruby. In horizontal texts, the furigana appear above the kanji and in
vertical texts, the furigana appear on the right of the kanji. In
newspapers it is a legal requirement for furigana to be attached to
kanji which are not included in the official list of the 1,945 most
frequently-used kanji. Newspapers in fact rarely use kanji not included
in this list.
Furigana in action

The furigana in the following text are the small red symbols.

Hiragana are sometimes used to write words which would normally

written with katakana to make them appear more "feminine",
particularly in comic books and cartoons for young girls. In children's
video games texts are often written entirely in hiragana or katakana.

Japanese Katakana
Origin

The katakana syllabary was derived from abbreviated Chinese

characters used by Buddhist monks to indicate the correct
pronunciations of Chinese texts in the 9th century. At first there were
many different symbols to represent one syllable of spoken Japanese,
but over the years the system was streamlined. By the 14th century,
there was a more or less one-to-one correspondence between spoken
and written syllables.
The word katakana "part (of kanji) syllabic script". The "part" refers to
the fact that katakana characters represent parts of kanji.
Characteristics and usage of katakana

The katakana syllabary consists of 48 syllables and was originally

considered "men's writing". Since the 20th century, katakana have
been used mainly to write non-Chinese loan words, onomatopoeic
words, foreign names, in telegrams and for emphasis (the equivalent

of bold, italic or upper case text in English). Before the 20th century all
foreign loanwords were written with kanji.
The Japanese katakana syllabary

In each column the rmaji appears on the left, the katakana symbols
in the middle and the kanji from which the symbols were derived on
the right.

The symbols for 'wi' and 'we' were made obsolete by the Japanese
Minsitry of Education in 1946 as part of its language reforms.
Additional sounds are represented by diacritics or combinations of
syllables:

The katakana for with the initial "v" are recent creations. This sound
used to written with the ones with the initial "b" and some people still
prefer to use those katakana.

Japanese Kanji

Between 5,000 and 10,000 Chinese characters, or kanji, are used in

written Japanese. In 1981 in an effort to make it easier to read and
write Japanese, the Japanese government introduced the jy kanji
hy (List of Chinese Characters for General Use), which includes 1,945
regular characters, plus 166 special characters used only for people's
names. All government documents, newspapers, textbooks and other
publications for non-specialists use only the these kanji. Writers of
other material are free to use whatever kanji they want.
Japanese children are expected to know all of the jy kanji by the end
of high school but to read specialist publications and ordinary
literature, they need to know another two or three thousand kanji.
The word kanji is the Japanese version of the Chinese word hnz,
which means "Han characters". Han refers to the Han Dynasty (206BC
- 220AD) and is the name used by the Chinese for themselves.
Whent the Japanese adopted Chinese characters to write the Japanese
language they also borrowed many Chinese words. Today about half
the vocabulary of Japanese comes from Chinese and Japanese kanji
are use to represent both Sino-Japanese words and native Japanese
words with the same meaning.
For example, the native Japanese word for water is mizu while the
Sino-Japanese word is sui. Both are written with the same character.
The former is known as the kun yomi (Japanese reading) of the
character while the latter is known as the on yomi (Chinese reading) of
the character.

Another example: the native Japanese word for horse is uma while the
Sino-Japanese words are ba and ma.

The characters in the word baka, which mean "horse deer", are used
for their phonetic values alone. The word comes from the Sanskrit
moha - ignorance, via the Chinese mh. Click here to see how the
character for horse is used in Chinese.
The general rule is that when a kanji appears on its own, it is given the
kun yomi, but when two or more kanji appear together, they are given
the on yomi. There are, of course, many exceptions to this rule. For
example it is sometimes difficult to work out how to pronounce
people's names because some of the kanji used for names have nonstandard pronunciations.
Some kanji have multiple on yomi and kun yomi (the first three
readings are on yomi, the last three are kun yomi):

In Mandarin Chinese, this character is pronounced 'xng' or 'hng'.

Multiple on yomi are often a result of borrowing words over a period of
many centuries, during which Chinese pronunciation changed, and also
borrowing words from different varieties of Chinese.
Some of the kanji have been simplified, although not always in the
same way as characters have been simplified in China:

There are also a number of characters, kokuji (national characters)

which were invented in Japan.

Japanese Rmaji (Roman letters)

Origin

The Latin alphabet was first used in Japan in the 16th century by
Portuguese missionaries, who devised a romanisation system based on
Portuguese spelling. Later the Dutch introduced a romanisation system
based on Dutch.
By the 20th century, there were a number of different romanisation
systems in use, including the Nippon, Kunrei and Hepburn systems.
The Hepburn system (/hebon-shiki) was devised by James
Curtis Hepburn (1815-1911), an American missionary from
Philadelphia. who arrived in Japan in 1859 and compiled the first
modern Japanese-English dictionary about a decade later. The Hepburn
system is now the most widely used romanisation system.
The Kunrei system (/kunreishiki "Cabinet Ordinance system")
was promulgated by the Japanese government during the 1930s. A
revised version was issued in 1954.
The main differences in spelling between the Kunrei and Hepburn
systems are as follows (Hepburn in brackets): si (shi), ti (chi), tu
(tsu), hu (fu), zi (ji), sya (sha), syu (shu), syo (sho), tya (cha), tyu
(chu), tyo (cho), zya (ja), zyu (ju), and zyo (jo). Long vowels: (),
(), (), (), ().
The Nippon system (/nipponshiki) was the creation of
Tanakadate Aikitsu and was first used in 1881. It is identical to the
Kunrei system except for the sounds da, di, du, de, do, dya, dyu, dyo,
which are written da, zi, zu, de, do, zya, zyu, zyo in the Kunrei system
and da, ji, zu, de, do, ja, ju, jo in the Hepburn system.
Rmaji (Hepburn System) with katakana and hiragana
Reading in vertical columns running from top to bottom and from right
to left, the first column is hiragana, the second is katakana and the
third is rmaji, and so on.
Basic syllables

Additional syllables

Pronunciation

Usage

Rmaji is the standard way of transliterating Japanese into the Latin

alphabet. In everyday written Japanese, rmaji can be used to write
numbers and abbreviations. It is also used in dictionaries, text books
and phrase books for foreign learners of Japanese.
When typing Japanese on computers, most people, both Japanese and
non-Japanese, use rmaji, which is converted to kanji, hiragana or
katakana by the input software. It is also possible to type in hiragana
or katakana if you have a Japanese keyboard, but few people are
familiar with this method.
Sample text

Subete no ningen wa, umare nagara ni shite jiy de ari, katsu, songen
to kenri to ni tsuite byd de aru. Ningen wa, risei to ryshin o
sazukerareteari, tagai ni dh no seishin o motte kd shinakereba
naranai.
Translation
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They
are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one

another in a spirit of brotherhood.

(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

The Japanese language (Nihongo)

Japanese is spoken by 126 million people mainly in Japan but also in
26 other countries including American Samoa, Argentina, Australia,
Belize, Brazil, Canada, Dominican Republic, Germany, Guam, Mexico,
Micronesia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Northern Mariana Islands, Palau,
Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines and Taiwan.
Japanese has no known linguistic relatives though is possibly distantly
related to the Altaic family of languages, which includes Korean,
Mongolian and Turkic languages. Japanese is not related to Chinese,
though it does contain a huge number of Chinese 'loan' words, in fact
perhaps 50% of the words used in Japanse are of Chinese origin.
Since the mid 18th century the Japanese have adopted a huge amount
of gairaigo: foreign words mainly from English. These include tburu
(table), bru (beer), gurasu (glass), aisu (ice), takush (taxi) and
hoteru (hotel).
There are also a few words from Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish, such
as pan (bread), from the Portuguese po. Such words arrived in Japan
mainly during the 16th and 17th centuries, when missionaries and
merchants started to visit the country.
One notable feature of Japanese is the tendency to create new words
by shortening and/or combining English words. Examples include
wpuro (word processor), sarariman ("salary man" = a male corporate
employee), OL, pronounced eru ("office lady" = a female corporate
employee) and masukomi (mass communications).
Another interesting feature of Japanese is the distinction between male
and female speech. This involves vocabulary, grammar and particularly
pitch - women tend to speak in very high, squeaky voices, at least in
public, while men prefer low, gruff voices. If a foreign man learns
Japanese from his Japanese girlfriend the results can sound very funny
to Japanese ears!