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Considering Hokusai was Japanese, the descriptions are probably written in Kanji. The word “kanji” itself means Chinese character, so I wonder what exactly is y
by thiagocesar 6y ago
Considering Hokusai was Japanese, the descriptions are probably written in Kanji. The word “kanji” itself means Chinese character, so I wonder what exactly is your point?
- andi999 6y agoRefereing to chinese character as Kanji is inaccurate. (Also the meaning of compound Hanzi and Kanji is often different, take "jiudian" as an example).
- fenomas 6y ago> Refereing to chinese character as Kanji is inaccurate. "Kanji" is often translated into English as "Chinese character", so the two terms tend to be used interchangeably even when someone is referring to text written in Japanese.
- andi999 6y agoThanks. I didnt know that. So would people call chinese texts also as kanji?
- fenomas 6y agoNot intentionally I don't think, but people might do that if they're not sure which language the characters came from or if they just don't know the term "hanzi".
- thiagocesar 6y agoIn Japanese there is no distinction between kanji and hanzi, they are the same thing, and written equally - 漢字. In English, it would be most appropriate to call Chinese language characters hanzi, and Japanese language characters kanji, but this is an English distinction, not one in the native tongues that use these characters. As the author of these drawings is Japanese, the correct term would be “kanji”, but the word “kanji” literally means “Chinese character”.
- thiagocesar 6y agoBut in this specific case, it is a Chinese character (because that’s what kanji is, and that’s what the word kanji means), and the character is actually kanji, since it was written by a Japanese author.
- bobbyz 6y agoI think I just found the linguistics equivalent to 'All asians look alike'
- thiagocesar 6y agoWhy do you think so?
- bobbyz 6y agoYou referring to hanzi as kanji is more or less the same as someone referring to a chinese person as a japanese person.
- thiagocesar 6y agoI am a Japanese person. I don’t see your point.