Slashdot Mirror
Official Kanji Count Increasing Due To Electronics
JoshuaInNippon writes "Those who have studied Japanese know how imposing kanji, or Chinese characters, can be in learning the language. There is an official list of 1,945 characters that one is expected to understand to graduate from a Japanese high school or be considered fluent. For the first time in 29 years, that list is set to change — increasing by nearly 10% to 2,136 characters. 196 are being added, and five deleted. The added characters are ones believed to be found commonly in life use, but are considered to be harder to write by hand and therefore overlooked in previous editions of the official list. Japanese officials seem to have recognized that with the advent and spread of computers in daily life, writing in Japanese has simplified dramatically. Changing the phonetic spelling of a word to its correct kanji only requires a couple of presses of a button, rather than memorizing an elaborate series of brush strokes. At the same time, the barrage of words that people see has increased, thereby increasing the necessity to understand them. Computers have simplified the task of writing in Japanese, but inadvertently now complicated the lives of Japanese language learners. (If you read Japanese and are interested in more details on specific changes, Slashdot.jp has some information!)"
Have Meriam and Webster added
Noob
Leet
Haxxor
Lolcat
pwned
yet?
There is an official list of 1,945 characters that one is expected to understand to graduate from a Japanese high school or be considered fluent. That's nothing... there's a lot more than 1,945 characters that kids are now expected to be able to recognize in order to be considered fluent in Pokeman!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
As far as I know, you can use katakana to write any foreign word. It's not absolutely necessary to add kanji characters.
Is it just me, or is having your language based on a character set that requires computer rendering for most people to be able to communicate clearly somewhat asinine?
No disrespect to those that practice the art of cartography, but for day to day communication... wow.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
But we are left with a problem: the kanji test that people take to get a certificate showing what they have learned (taken by students and others in Japan) will now become more difficult. This technology has allowed people to become more exposed and use a wider variety of kanji, but it has also become a crutch. Many people can read a lot of kanji, but are hard pressed to remember it and write it by hand (which is required for the test).
It's also contributed to many Japanese forgetting how to write many less common kanji because in their day-to-day life most of them rarely have to write by hand anymore. They type the sound and press "convert" and pick from a list on both their PCs and cell phones.
The only thing I can think when I see this story is, WTF? Why does Slashdot.jp get UTF-8, and regular Slashdot gets ISO-8859-1? I know I've tried to post foreign characters before, as others have, and they just get ignored.
I figured they were too lazy to implement it into Slashcode. Now it's obvious that they're avoiding it.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Really, why have three sets of script/alphabet/glyphs?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
...words related to the describing of new variants of tentacle rape. And Godzilla.
I don't see whats Ironic about it. Whats your definition of irony?
Finally we can decipher slashdot.jp. For surely among the top stories there must be precisely the following text:
"Those who have studied in our country know how imposing kanji, or Chinese characters, can be in learning our language. There is an official list of 1,945 characters that we are expected to understand to graduate from one of our high schools or be considered fluent. For the first time in 29 years, that list is set to change — increasing by nearly ten percent to 2,136 characters. 196 are being added, and 5 deleted. The added characters are ones we all know are found commonly in life use, but are obviously harder to write by hand and therefore overlooked in previous editions of the official list. Our officials seem to have recognized that with the advent and spread of computers in daily life, writing in this country has simplified dramatically. Changing the phonetic spelling of a word to its correct kanji only requires a couple presses of a button, rather than memorizing an elaborate series of brush strokes. At the same time, the barrage of words that people see has increased, thereby increasing the necessity to understand them. Computers have simplified the task of writing in Japanese, but inadvertently now complicated the lives of learners of our language. (Oh, if you read English and are interested in more details on specific changes, Slashdot.org has some information!)"
With this summary, we can finally crack the Japanese language!
Irony is the Americans won the war of independence and annexed ownership of the English language and adjusted pronunciations and spellings and informed everyone else that American English is correct.
Fixed that for you.
1331461 is only semiprime *sigh* Alas - I am just short of 1337.
Why have a definite article? Why have different ways to pronounce the same syllables as presented in different words? Why have silent letters? Why have emphasis marks on different syllables? Why capitalize certain words, like the cardinal directions? Languages aren't exactly developed by informed committee. The reason you have little quirks like this in Japanese is because, much like English, it's an amalgation of other languages that has developed over centuries rather than a "pure" development.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Why does Slashdot.jp get UTF-8, and regular Slashdot gets ISO-8859-1?
One old crapflooding technique was to use characters intended for use with right-to-left scripts (Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Thaana) to spoof moderation and distort the layout of other comments to the article. See my earlier post on the topic, as well as Encyclopedia Dramatica's.
If the Brit's wanted to keep Humour and Colour, and other odd sayings (Chips instead of Fries for example), maybe they should have tried harder to win the war?
[/sarcasm]
Boy, this is really going to blow your mind when you realize that the English alphabet you're typing in is a modified form of the Latin alphabet, which was a borrowed and changed form of the Etruscan alphabet. The Etruscans had of course borrowed and modified the Greek alphabet (get it, Alpha Beta??). The Greeks had taken the Phoenician Alphabet, "bastardized" and "basically copied" and "changed it at it's [sic] will." The Phoenicians were uncreative hacks as well, and starting from Egyptian hieroglyphics just changed it without any respect to the original creators.
Now we're talking about 3000+ years of bastardization, copying, and changing at will (irony? no), so the evidence is a little shaky, but who knows who the Egyptians shamelessly copied from? Probably the Sumerians. Awful.
Some information for you...truly independent creations of writing systems have been rather rare worldwide. Take for instance Mongolian script. It looks pretty unusual right? Pretty geographically isolated area, far from e.g. the Middle East. Possibly unique? Nope. The Mongols (an Altaic language) borrowed from the Uyghurs (a Turkic language) who borrowed from the Sogdians (an Indo-European language) who borrowed from Syriac (Semitic language) and Aramaic. And so on, further and further back.
That process of bastardization, copying, and changing at will is how knowledge and language and culture throughout history has progressed. The total vast majority of people on the planet write their native language in a script that can be traced back to Phoenician or Chinese characters.
Irony is the Americans claiming they won the war of independence yet still speaking the queens English and then raping the hell out of it and telling everyone else their spelling is the correct one.
Actually, being able to not speak and speak the Queen's (or King's) English at the same time shows innovation.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
"These nails taste irony."
I checked out the Slashdot.jp article, and got absolutely nothing out of it.
Why would those who read a roman alphabet be directed to a site in Japanese for more information?
Irony is the Americans claiming they won the war of independence yet still speaking the queens English and then raping the hell out of it and telling everyone else their spelling is the correct one.
Call it a war of independence, revolution, whatever, the semantics tend to be irrelevant as the fledgling United States DID win.
Is it perhaps ironic that you claim post-revolutionary American's kept speaking the "queens English" and yet "raped" the hell out of it? Perhaps that should tell you something? It's called linguistic evolution! It happens to everyone, even you.
Besides... who _exactly_ "tells everyone else their spelling is the correct one" ?
Well, Chinese words have a much larger set than what's in the offical set of Traditional Chinese of Taiwan/HK or simplified Chinese of mainland China/Singapore/etc. In the traditional time, although there is offical set of words, there are usually more writing form of the same word that are used and recognized by scholars, and they are often used freely without a very strong constraint on "you must use the offical form", even in Chinese classics and classic history books. The offical form also changes depends on a balance in "which form is used more" and "what's more correct". An example is, I know 3 different forms of how to write the word "fish" in Chinese. And 4 different ways to write the word "one". And I've seen all those in differnet classic books (in their original word form). Now, a certain form of Chinese words get passed to Korea and China at different time, from different location, and from different people. And they have been using it for hundreds of years themselves. So you can call them Chinese writers, and scholars in Korea and Japan write their writings in classical Chinese for years. They ARE Chinese scholars and users. They know our words, and they know our literatures. So they have all the rights to Change word form as long as it's following the rules. Personally, I'd say the way the Japanese simplified their words are much better than those simplified Chinese in terms of following the traditional rule. The original draft of simplified Chinese created by the Nationalist Party/Republic of China government was based on the Japanese simpilfied Chinese, adding in "scremble form" () and "smooth form" () of Chinese. and are written form and putting those as printed/standard word form breaks the rule of Chinese word. So the China-Simplified-Chinese creaters actually break Chinese way more than the Japanese did. Unfortunately.
Really, why have three sets of script/alphabet/glyphs?
The main usage is kanji for roots of words, then kana for inflectional endings, like the -s ending of English plurals. Some words are spelled phonetically in kana. Some company names are spelled in katakana (e.g. Toyota, Suzuki), while others are spelled in kanji (e.g. Mitsubishi).
...laura
Besides... who _exactly_ "tells everyone else their spelling is the correct one" ?
apparently anyone with a keyboard on slashdot.
Historically Japanese took Chinese characters (Kanji) for its writing system, as it had none of its own. It wasn't a perfect fit, as the languages were different. Chinese characters are pictoral/conceptual, not phonetic. The Japanese characters that were adapted were based mostly on meaning, so reading a character in Japanese would sound different than the same character in Chinese, but some were based on similar sounds too. This was all done more than a thousand years ago, so some associations no longer make sense. Katakana and Hiragana were independently developed phonetic alphabets that were essentially derived from "shorthand" for the various Kanji. One could theoretically use only one of the phonetic alphabets, but there are relatively few distinct sounds in Japanese (5 vowels, for one) that there are lots and lots of homophones. It is actually easier for reading comprehension to use the Kanji to distinguish between these items.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
The asian countries need to "get with the times". Pictographic languages are so 1100BC.
I meant to write 'calligraphy' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calligraphy). Brain to finger malfunction.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
At first i thought they meant they were adding completely new kanji specifically dealing with modern electronics (presumably to replace older kanji that had previously been adapted to the task.) Which led to the thought that since originally a lot of kanji got their start as pictograms that were them simplified to their current forms, wouldn't it be cool if new kanji for electronics were developed from simplified versions of circuit diagrams?
Alas, it was not to be.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Because it's easier than one set like Chinese. Hiragana to help you learn how to sound it out, Katakana for foreign words, and Kanji for big boys, and girls. I still am sad I can only read roughly 400 ;_;
Big deal. I have to remember like 20000 of them.
Really, why have three sets of script/alphabet/glyphs?
Says the the person typing in a language using at least 4 sets. {capital, lower case}x{printed, cursive}
Is written with Roman characters, taken from the Greeks, taken from probably the Phoenicians.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
That's why we need strong Intellectual Property protection.
Just think of the real true thing, hieroglyphs, provided by the clergy of Amon, available through scribes for Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory fees. Don't accept counterfeit alphabets!
Patent protection would have to be extended to 3000 years, but we're getting there.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Why don't you add a set for every god damn fonts while you are it, Mr. Einstein?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
When will you Humans grow the F up and choose one standard audible, written, and inaudible (sign) language to teach your children!??
Within less than one century you would be rid of this foolishness...
Such a ludicrously inefficient and overly sentimental species!
Ok, the characters listed aren't difficult, or uncommon, they just aren't "official." The real issue here is, why the hell does slashdot.jp have more features than slashdot.org? Click an external link, and there's an interstitial offering a direct, Google cache, and web archive (Way Back Machine) link. Seriously, bring this to .org. And add Coral cache to both, I know it's got an l AND an r in it, but it could still benefit .jp.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
Does this trend have something to do with the shifting of the balance of power in the world?
The Japanese language is well-known for absorbing foreign words and language concepts into its own domestic use, especially from cultures / societies it deems powerful or dominant. It was Chinese during the Ming dynasty, Portuguese/Spanish during the 1600s, German during the 1800s, English from WW2 onwards.
Now that China is a relative economic superpower, maybe the trend is now to absorb Chinese words again?
Japanese students now prefer to study abroad in China rather than the U.S.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
That's linguistic ownage.
The main usage is kanji for roots of words, then kana for inflectional endings, like the -s ending of English plurals.
That is wrong.
Japanese has no plural nor gender. Kanji words have no "endings" that need to be reflected in hiragana.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So to be fluent, a high-school student must know about 2,000 characters?!
I'm a Chinese minor (in the US at a university), and we only learn the most basic of topics (sports, food, family, transportation). My list of "you better know these" is about 5,000 characters long. And I use traditional characters too, because I prefer a 1:1 mapping of meaning to character.
So a 10% increase shouldn't be a big deal if you're already (somewhat) used to writing them out.
Why don't you add a set for every god damn fonts while you are it, Mr. Einstein?
Because, dufus, while a different font only offer a variation of the same set of basic shapes, a different case actually is a very different shape. Then the cursive is yet another very different set. This may not be obvious for those who learned the letters very young and have not yet started teaching their young ones, but it's very obvious to those who learned English later on in life of are observing young children learning the alphabet.
Is it completely ignorant to suggest that when language changes require a character set to be modified, that the approach itself is impractical and ought to be phased out? What's the kanji for chortle, for instance? It wouldn't be the first time a people (Scots, Irish) had to face up to the reality that being a cultural island loses in the long run.
The characters that cause such things are a well-known set.
The set could be extended in a future version of Unicode.
Like the control (<32) characters in ASCII.
And like an additional block of control characters (0x80-0x9F) was added in the ISO 8859 encodings.
I don't see whats Ironic about it. Whats your definition of irony?
You know, it's like rain, on your wedding day. Things like that.
Bow-ties are cool.
Something developed in China is being bastardized by a foreign country who basically copied it and is changing it at its will?
Well, that has been going on with the Chinese character set in various other countries for some time - but this is not an example of that. This isn't about them changing the characters in use, they're just changing their officially recognized selection of what characters are part of the "standard" set which (according to the government) all Japanese should know. People can still use characters outside of that set.
Bow-ties are cool.
Irony is the Americans claiming they won the war of independence yet still speaking the queens English and then raping the hell out of it and telling everyone else their spelling is the correct one.
Irony? I don't know. What better way to flaunt our old victory over the English than to continue our long practice of systemic abuse and degradation of the English language?
Bow-ties are cool.
That is many characters have a meaning-signifier (radical) and a sound signifier. The sound part gives clue to the pronunciation. I can often guess the meaning and pronunciation of a new character. Mor importantly these parts serve as memory aids for recognizing and drawing the character.
Sometimes a kanji character has been imported to Japanese with a Chinese-like meaning, but solely Japanese pronunciation. Sometimes a Chinese transliteration accompanies the borrowing. And sometimes it the orignal Chinese meaning is now totally alien.
Cases, style, and fonts all have one-to-one correspondence to the same alphabet set. Just like kana+kanji. Oh, no, it's not like that at all. But that's ok if your muddled brain can't grok.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Irony is the Americans claiming they won the war of independence yet still speaking the queens English and then raping the hell out of it and telling everyone else their spelling is the correct one.
Actually, being able to not speak and speak the Queen's (or King's) English at the same time shows innovation.
True. It's like having tea time, and having no tea, while at the same time having tea.
Bow-ties are cool.
hirigana and katakana have a one to one correspondence too.
and romaji, for those times japanese used that.
So the only one that is different is kanji, and that isn't absolutely necessary, although it is more of a grownup accent for disambiguation and sortening.
So basically you have two sets with one not as important. 1.5 is not as bad as the 3 originally suggested and
he still has point about cursive vs printed.
As far as I know, you can use katakana to write any foreign word. It's not absolutely necessary to add kanji characters.
Kanji has the advantage of succinctness over phonetic systems.
I did wikipedia it, but perhaps you did not do so as thoroughly as I. Or you are simply upset by how I summarized the links between the alphabets.
"The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Alphabet
"... was borrowed and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome, whose alphabet was then adapted and further modified by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet
"Old Italic refers to several now extinct alphabet systems used on the Italian Peninsula in ancient times for various Indo-European languages (predominantly Italic) and non-Indo-European (e.g. Etruscan) languages." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italic_alphabet
"The most important sign is the /S/, shaped like a fir tree, and possibly a derivation from the Phoenician alphabet." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_alphabet
"The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet ... One of its descendants, the Greek alphabet, revamped some letters to more consistently represent vowels." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet
A book (or two) that details the history of Indo-European alphabets more thoroughly might be worthwhile if you're interested in links between Latin, Etruscan, forms of Greek, or Phoenician.
What is curious is you get upset then state "Roughly speaking, 50% of the greek chars appear in the roman alphabet. And 30% of those have a different meaning, pronunciation." So there is a relationship. Did you expect it to be 100% identical in form and meaning? I find that people in different regions of my own continent pronounce vowels differently. This also occurs over time as well, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_shift
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
...in China, people are trying to SIMPLY the writing...
I live in Japan and I've talked to Japanese teachers about this; I've also seen the kanji they're adding. It's not "because of computers" or "because they need computers to write kanji" -- the kanji they took out are very, very rarely used, with one being an archaic form of measurement equal to around 350 grams or something. A lot of the kanji they added are kanji that ARE common-use kanji as a matter of fact, just not officially. Many of the ones they added are simple ones that show up in a ton of names. Another example is the kanji for "turtle" -- something that comes up often enough that you'd think it would have been in the original set to begin with. It's not some gigantic "Oh god nobody speaks our language and everyone's stuck on computers" deal; it's just MEXT updating their "official" set to reflect the changing times and vocabulary... and fix some mistakes from the past.
People forgetting how to write kanji due to always using cell phones or computers IS a problem, but unrelated to the update to the Joyo Kanji.
http://www.tenjou.net/
You're correct when it comes to script in europe, however chinese characters don't influence any other written languages languages, they are incorporated as they are to specify a specific meaning of a term. This is how they are used in both korean and japanese. Sure there's loanwords or patterns of joining terms that might be borrowed into other languages, but that's a grammatical or loanword influence.
.. it'd be like saying that a caricature of the queen of england influences the way the term 'Queen' is written.
Chinese characters are pictograms (ie. little pictures that convey a meaning independent of the spoken language) and alphabets are renderings of pronounciation
I've been learning Japanese for 4 years and have level 1 of the JLPT and I can say with confidence that this doesn't complicate anything for learners at all. If you're at all serious about learning Japanese you'll need to accept that the Jouyou-Kanji-Hyou (the list being discussed here) is not the definitive guide and you have to know lots of characters beyond that list. Most people would say about 3000 characters at least for literacy.
Government agencies might choose to avoid using kanji not on it. However they often ignore it. Some newspapers now days pay attention to it and replace characters not on it with katakana. For example 'hatan' is often written in newspapers with the character for 'yaburu' (i.e. 'ha') followed by tan written in katakana. Although even government agencies and newspapers use some characters which aren't on it. Everyone else just ignores it and uses whatever characters they see fit.
It was never designed to assist Japanese learners and (at least previously) contained some extremely rare characters which you seldom see used which omitting extremely common characters that you'd expect even a 8 year old to be able to read. (An 8 year old Japanese kid that is obviously)
P.s. According to the comments on the slashdot.jp article the characters mentioned there are a hidden reference to some dating sims titles (Or however you want to translate eroge).
Honestly, a small increase in kanji, by 196 characters, people are complaining about learning Japanese? Try learning Chinese 100% kanji at 10,000 characters or more.
I cringe a bit every time a story like this pops up. Here come the myths, the misinformation, the wild exaggerations... Life was easier before the "anime/manga" fans took up their little obsession.
Well, let's be positive: This is a learning & teaching experience, right? So for the interested, a bit of debunking about Japanese:
1) "Kanji" is not a language.
I know, I haven't seen anyone on this page make that mistake, so I'm not pointing a finger at anyone here. Just at people out there who do think "kanji" is the name of the language – like Steve Jobs in his keynote a couple days ago. I had to write a debunking: http://www.homejapan.com/japanese-language-is-not-kanji
2) Japanese does NOT use "three writing systems". (That claim does appear on this page.)
Japanese uses ONE writing system. Precisely one. No more, no less. It contains multiple character sets, including Chinese characters (aka kanji), home-grown "kana" phonetic characters (with two variants, hiragana & katakana), punctuation & typographic symbols (including some from European languages), and Arabic numerals. Those all combine to form exactly ONE writing system.
It's nothing special. English uses multiple character sets, including Latin letters (with two variants, upper case & lower case), punctuation & typographic symbols, and Arabic numerals. All of which combine to form ONE writing system.
I haven't written a post on this one yet, but definitely need to. That "three writing systems" is a really common misconception. (Comment by Moridineas is very much on the right track, pointing out that the jumble of features and origins found in the Japanese writing system is just the normal way human language rolls.)
3) "OMG Japanese is so hard." Well, that's purely opinion, so I won't say it's right or wrong or a misconception or anything. I'll just add that there are learners with precisely the opposite opinion: I call it a wonderfully easy language to learn! There are plenty of reasons; see http://www.homejapan.com/2008/02/whats_easy_about_learning_japanese .
Lots more linguistic debunking at my site. But I'll refrain from further boring the good people here.
So, anyway. Fascinating stuff, and actually it's nice to see so many people take an interest. Let's just watch the exaggerations and stick to reality. (Yeah, like that'll happen. Who am I kidding? : )
Yes, having to do with breast, suckling, etc. Wonder why. This is according to a linked news article at http://www.jiji.com/jc/c?g=soc_30&k=2010060700495
The Joyo list is pretty irrelevant anyway, used maybe as a guide for high school textbooks and not much else. Most of the new characters they're adding are very common, and everyone knows them already. Actual literacy in Japanese requires more like 3,000-4,000 characters, which everyone just picks up through reading and daily life regardless of what the government's official list says.
And as you probably know, for those learning Japanese or Chinese as a second language, characters start getting a lot easier once you know a thousand of them or so.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
The opposite of wrinkly.
I believe the GP was giving the English plural ending of -s as an example of an inflectional ending, rather than as an example of an actual Japanese inflectional ending, but I'll agree it's somewhat unclear for those who don't already know what we're talking about.
To make things a bit clearer: nouns are often written with kanji, although there are exceptions; verbs and many adjectives are written with kanji + hiragana. One of the primary functions of the hiragana on verbs and adjectives is to conjugate them: for example, in contrast to English go/went, in Japanese it's iku/itta, where the 'i' in both words uses the same kanji, and hiragana are used for ku/tta respectively.
Noooo!
Hopefully this doesn't add a bunch of 20+ stroke kanji to the JLPTs.
The total vast majority of people on the planet write their native language in a script that can be traced back to Phoenician or Chinese characters.
You're correct when it comes to script in europe, however chinese characters don't influence any other written languages languages, they are incorporated as they are to specify a specific meaning of a term.
I am by no means an expert on East Asian languages, but my understanding is that your statement is basically flat out wrong.
For instance in this story, (AFAIK) Japanese kanji do not always have identical or the same meanings to the original Chinese characters. Seeing as how Kanji and other earlier scripts used Chinese characters to encode Japanese words and grammar, I think this is an important distinction. Secondly and far more to the point, the other two Japanese writing systems--Katakana and Hiragana--are syllabic yet their forms are derived DIRECTLY from Chinese characters. Exactly what I was talking about.
In the case of Korean, I thought characters weren't used frequently anymore. I don't know if there are direct analogs between the Korean alphabet and Chinese characters, but the influence is clear.
I don't know that any of them are used currently, but I also remember that some northern Chinese "barbarian" groups in history used Chinese character-derived scripts.
The Latin Alphabet is most used, followed by Ara
WHOOSH
Nimrod, The point and the the "irony" which you seem to have missed is the whole notion of the Chinese being the originators and not the copycats.
Except when they, you know, invaded China and tried to force Chinese to use Japanese names. But, hey, keep up with your Japanese Holocaust denial. I'm sure the rest of the world won't consider you a bunch of backwards, racist, arrogant pricks!
Similar to the upcoming US election results
In America, we play golf at tee time, you insensitive clod!
I have to give credit to Korea for their Hangul writing system. It's very nice!
That would be the folks at the Oxford English Dictionary, the only authority on English language vocabulary and spelling etc, that matters as far as many English speakers are concerned.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Besides... who _exactly_ "tells everyone else their spelling is the correct one"
You'd have to be a moron to think the USA "English" is the "correct one".
USA "English" ought to be given another name, it's certainly not English.
As far as I can tell, my knowledge of kanji is limited to anime and Engrish sites, if a kanji is the same as a Chinese character, the meaning is the same. If the kanji looks like a Chinese character, but really has no Chinese character that's the same, it could have a different meaning that what it was base on.
Die, faggot!!
Rain on your wedding day.
In fact, the Greek actually gave some credit to the Phoenician alphabet. Before they've had graphein [transliterated], they used to phoinizein [transliterated], "to do what a Phoenician does" and was just lost later on. You can't be that hard on them.
Nope. There are plenty of instances where there is an identical kanji to an extant Chinese character, but the meaning has changed over the centuries such that the Japanese meaning (and usually also, reading) is different from the Chinese one.
Wouldn't it be much easier for Japanese and Chinese to be simplified by using an alphabet, as is done with European and other languages?
Why do they continue to use an overly complicated system?
irony - adj. - of, resembling, relating to, or tasting much like iron. e.g. "The anvil was delicious, but irony." cf. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=irony&r=f
Thanks for the note...that was my understanding but I know very little about east Asian languages.
In a somewhat similar situation, there are a TON of Arabic loanwords into Persian and Turkish. Over the years many of these words have changed so that an Arabic reader would be very confused by many of them! As an eg (bad transliteration ahead) the Arabic words shey/eshya (s/pl) means "thing/things." In Turkish shey/eshya means "thing/luggage"
True. It's like having tea time, and having no tea, while at the same time having tea.
In a cracked cup, an' all.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
I am disappointed in you all. Does no one get the Hitchhiker's Guide reference?
Bow-ties are cool.
Have you noticed the http://kanji.sljfaq.org/kanji16/draw-canvas.html link on Jim Breen's http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi website? Makes it dead easy for Westerners and clumsy beginners to enter three or four strokes of a handwritten character (using the mouse!) and get immediate feedback in the form of 20 candidate characters that might match what you've entered so far. This is the most lenient "clumsy kanji" analysis routine I've seen so far. Bodes very well for cyberlinguistics.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Practically speaking, this will only have a significant effect on those unfortunate children whose parents dig up one of these obscure characters for use in a personal name, as there is an increased chance that other people will not be able to read the person's name, or will read it improperly.
Imagine the irritation at having the FEDEX guy always misread your name when he hands you a parcel.
That is, if you wanted to name your child using one of these characters yesterday, your application would have been rejected at city hall. Today, as a result of this decision, the clerks will probably have to accept the name, no matter how obscure.
In summary, this is good for parents and bad for children.
"For someone acquiring a non-native language, the difficulty of that second language is entirely dependent on that person's first language."
Yes indeed. Japanese, for example, may be the *easiest* foreign language you could study if you're already fluent in Korean.