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Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
- Freak_NL 6y agoThe word 'sinogram' sounds a bit contrived, and is not something I see a lot of scholars on this topic use. I personally would recommend against using it. They are mostly just called 'Chinese characters' in English when referring to these logograms, or simply 'kanji' if specifically talking about the Chinese characters in use in Japanese writing. Kanji (and in Korean 'hanja') literally means Han characters after all. I'm glad the Japanese writing system survived the first waves of digitization (at which point a vocal group of people worldwide was willing to sacrifice cultural artefacts and linguistic finesse for the sake of modernization) and in time put its own mark on things like character encoding and the technical capabilities of fonts on computers.
- solarmist 6y agoThe essay feels like something written in the 1970s.
- gerikson 6y agoThe author seems to be French-speaking, and "sinogramme" seems to be an accepted term in French: > Les caractères chinois, ou sinogrammes, sont les unités logographiques qui composent l'écriture des langues chinoises. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caract%C3%A8res_chinois https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caract%C3%A8res_chinois
- Freak_NL 6y agoAh, that would explain it.
- DocTomoe 6y agoSome additional information: France is actually a leading country when it comes to Japanese Studies, to the point where high-level knowledge of French is a relevant skill in pursuing Japanese studies elsewhere, as many papers were historically only available in French.
- mytailorisrich 6y agoI studies Japanese a bit in France a long time ago and was told that spoken French includes all the sounds of spoken Japanese so that a French speaker should have no problem pronouncing Japanese, apart from the accent. This is in contrast to the endless trouble French speakers have with the English 'th'...
- yorwba 6y agoThe stereotypical French speaker who has trouble with English [h] would definitely have the same problem with the Japanese [h], [ç] and [ɸ]. If they can't manage the tongue placement for English [θ], how are they supposed to handle Japanese [ɕ] and [ʑ]? And that's just the consonants. Usually when someone thinks that language X has all the sounds of language Y, it's a speaker of language X who hasn't yet realized that their ears are too attuned to language X to recognize the sounds of language Y as something different. Don't trust your ears!
- mytailorisrich 6y agoIt's only the letter H and R (as transcribed in romaji) that are not immediate for a French speaker but they are not difficult. Certainly much simpler than 'th' in English. (Source: not my ears but Japanese textbooks)
- yorwba 6y agoHow would a French speaker pronounce し [ɕi] and じ [ʑi]? My guess would be « chi » [ʃi] and « ji » [ʒi]. Close enough to be understood, but different enough to be noticeable.
- anthk 6y ago>This is in contrast to the endless trouble French speakers have with the English 'th'... They have a whole country in the South to practice that sound...
- kergonath 6y ago
- GolDDranks 6y agoI did a MA of East Asian Studies at Helsinki University, and our professor ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juha_Janhunen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juha_Janhunen ) used the word sinogram as the standard terminology for the characters. I think this served two functions: 1) to disentangle the concept from a "character used in Chinese language", as sinograms are used at least in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. 2) to create a parallel with words like "logograms" and "phonograms", as sinograms are not purely either, but contain features from both.
- ekianjo 6y ago> as sinograms are used at least in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnam While technically a true statement, the usage of kanji in Korea and Vietnam is now fairly limited - Korea uses typically a system based on combining sounds together nowadays (while you still see them use Kanji for names or titles here and there) and Vietnam has moved to (an accent-rich) alphabet during the French colonization .
- rational_indian 6y agoI'd say good riddance. Why saddle yourself with this abomination?
- blacktriangle 6y agoHonestly, because it is crazy easy to read sinograms. I only lived in Japan for a few months and casually studied the language, but I wasn't with any other foreigners so I was 100% immersed in the language. At the end of the few months I reached the point where I could read Japanese faster than I can read English. It's as if reading a phonetic language still has to go through a process of symbol -> sound -> picture -> meaning in our brains, where a more ideographic language goes symbol -> meaning directly thus cutting out a lot of the processing time. Given that any given text is going to be read thousands of times more than it is written, the extra complexity in writing seems well worth the trade-off.
- 6y ago
- Kelamir 6y agoOne can refer to Chinese characters as hanzi.
- Freak_NL 6y agoOnly when referring to the Chinese characters as used in Chinese.
- smohare 6y agoSinograph is the term I’ve seen used in many introductory texts on Japanese. Apparently it was added just this month to the Oxford English Dictionary. https://public.oed.com/updates/new-words-list-march-2021/ https://public.oed.com/updates/new-words-list-march-2021/
- andrewzah 6y ago"Kanji (and in Korean 'hanja') literally means Han characters after all." They mean that in the specific context of those languages. The set of hanzi is different than the set of kanji, which is different than the set of hanja, which is different than characters that Taiwan uses. They are -not- the same characters. I see no real issue with using sinogram/sinograph over Chinese character since it refers to a Chinese character being used in another language. And it obviates the whole hanzi, kanji, hanja thing when not necessary.
- EmilieTypo 6y agoYes indeed, I am French-speaking and "sinogrammes" is the most appropriate word in the academic world to talk about kanji. I am not sure if it is the same in the English academic world, some of the comments suggested that it is. I am going to check further about this point. (But writing my PhD in French so I will be safe anyway ^^)
- solarmist 6y agoWow. Hentaigana is not a word that has aged well.
- Clewza313 6y agoIt's a different hentai: 変体 "variant form", not 変態 "abnormal, perverse". Bukkake soba (cold noodles with a splash of sauce) also continues to exist despite English adopting a rather different meaning for the word.
- solarmist 6y agoOh! Yeah, that rings a bell now. I don’t know why my comment got flagged. It was an honest reaction. Even Japanese people would see the confusion I had. Kanji puns are the bread and butter of Japanese humor.
- RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u 6y agoI read parts of the article, and skimmed the rest, and almost spat water at my screen when I read the last section: > Hentaigana : beauties > > The word hentaigana is made of kana, — syllabic elements —, and hentai [...] Here she (?) is referring to 変体 and not 変態. Earlier in the article she said "[j]apanese language is a very playful language" but I don't think she's thinking of homonyms. :-)
- EmilieTypo 6y agoSorry if I made you spat water on your screen haha! You are right, I should correct in my article "differs from the norm" by "different in shape". Thanks!
- Clewza313 6y ago> some words that are common and were originally written in kanji are now written with hiragana (such as the word "here", ここ instead of 此処). Not really. Japanese as a spoken language predates writing systems, and words like "koko" are yamatokotoba (original Japanese), not loans from other languages. It was first written in kanji (Chinese characters) because that was the only script they had initially, hiragana and katakana came later. To confuse things even more, 此処 is valid Chinese as well, but the pronunciation is unrelated, they just mapped the meaning on top. This is also fairly common, to the point that there's a technical term for it (jukujikun).
- wodenokoto 6y agoYou add in some interesting, additional facts, but you do not in anyway refute what the author wrote. I think your comment would make more sense if you removed the “not really“ in the beginning. You come off as saying “No, it was not written in kanji at first. It was initially written in kanji!” Which casts a weird, negative shadow on the otherwise interesting facts you add.
- Clewza313 6y agoIt's a pretty subtle point, but the author is saying that "some words were originally written in kanji", while I'm noting that for a word like ここ, that's only true if you include the time when everything was originally written kanji. So the statement is technically correct, but IMHO rather misleading, since (the man'yogana pre-kana period aside) it's generally quite rare for word to make the leap from kanji to kana. An even more subtle point is that kanji usage is fluid, so it's perfectly correct to write many words as kanji or kana, but with subtle shifts in meaning. For example, いい and 良い are both "good", but the latter is more formal and may even be read differently (yoi vs ii).
- ekianjo 6y ago> An even more subtle point is that kanji usage is fluid, so it's perfectly correct to write many words as kanji or kana, but with subtle shifts in meaning. For example, いい and 良い are both "good", but the latter is more formal and may even be read differently (yoi vs ii). Correct, and sometimes words who are otherwise written in Kanji can be written in Kana in order to put emphasis on them, similar to how we use italics in Western languages.
- ksec 6y agoReading this reminding me of Modern Digital Publishing and Layout still largely ignores vertical text. [1], and that is especially true on the Web. [1] https://atadistance.net/2019/10/20/japanese-text-layout-for-the-future-hint-there-isnt-one/ https://atadistance.net/2019/10/20/japanese-text-layout-for-...
- simonebrunozzi 6y agoI am currently memorizing Hiragana (~100% done) and Katagana (~10% done), before venturing into learning some basic Japanese. It's incredibly and unnecessarily complicated, from the perspective of a "westerner" (Italian roots, fluent in English, some Spanish, bits of French). I'm still fascinated by it, and still want to learn some, primarily because I like visiting Japan and I plan to spend several weeks per year there. Kyoto is my favorite city. Last year I was fortunate enough to spend 3 months there, at the beginning of the pandemic (March to June 2020). It would be great if languages could be "upgraded" to remove the hardest parts, both for native speakers and for foreigners willing to learn. I remember reading that a famous poet/literate (can't remember who) tried to propose that for the Spanish language, decades ago. Otherwise, it would be nice to have a universal language that everyone can learn and speak. Obviously, English is now occupying that spot, but I'd bet that English is certainly not the easiest, nor the most complete, language we could use. Attempts such as Esperanto and others were never carried out with enough skills or resources. I'm wondering if it could be possible to do so today. Coincidentally, I wrote a novel ~20 years ago, in which the protagonist is a language professor that invents a new universal language, called Galatico, and "open sources" it for the benefit of humanity. I even ventured as far as designing the basic concepts of this artificial language. It was really fun. Without knowing it, I used an alphabet system (base 64, in my case) similar to the one used in the Cistercian numerals [0]. I discovered this just two months ago, when visiting a Cistercian monastery in Italy, and then reading more about these monks. Truly fascinating, for me. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cistercian_numerals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cistercian_numerals
- Jonnax 6y agoJust because a language more complicated to someone with a different culture doesn't mean that it's unnecessarily complicated. It's a very westerner thing to say "your language is too complicated, you should simplify it for me"
- Clewza313 6y agoWell, you can actually make a pretty good objective case for Japanese writing being the most complicated writing system on the planet, since no other language that I'm aware of regularly mixes 4 scripts, where basically entirety of Chinese forms just one of those scripts. Except that whereas in Chinese it's rare for a character to have more than one or two readings, in Japanese there are characters with over 70： https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Japanese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Japanese It's telling that there is what's effectively a reading test for Japanese people, where it requires 12 years of schooling to take a stab at Level 2 (covering only the "daily use" kanji!), and Level 1 requires years of additional study on top of that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_Kentei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_Kentei
- euske 6y agoWhat's amazing about hentai-kana (hentai as "alternative form", not pervert) is that governments and town registrars still allow using them as an official name in their electronic registry. I recently got a copy of my family register, and found out that my grandma's name was officially in hentai kana. Apparently they made special fonts for each unique character, but I don't know how they're encoded on their database. It was kinda awe-inspiring how much they care the details like that. They could replace it with a regular kana but they didn't. Names are serious business!
- gioele 6y ago> I don't know how they're encoded on their database. All hentaigana are available in Unicode 10. They can be found in the Unicode block 1B000–1B12F (Kana Supplement + Kana Extended-A). For example, U+1B004 𛀄 HENTAIGANA LETTER A-3
- phonon 6y agoThey're not in JIS X 0213, so don't expect them to be widely available any time soon...
- Jonnax 6y agoHentaigana have unicode codes as you can see in this table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentaigana#In_Unicode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentaigana#In_Unicode So all they need to do is use a font that implements it.
- colejohnson66 6y agoAccording to that page, they were only implemented in 2017. So any systems before that wouldn’t’ve been using Unicode.
- ekianjo 6y ago> Names are serious business! It's also serious because names are accepted as signature using hanko (official stamps) for official business and procedures.
- tkgally 6y agoA bit off topic: I happened to talk with an editor at a large Japanese publishing company a few hours ago and the marketability of audiobooks came up. While audio versions of Japanese fiction and nonfiction books are produced and sold, he said the business has never really taken off and his own company isn’t interested in it anymore. This contrasts with what seems to be a healthy and growing audiobook market in English-speaking countries. I speculated that the nature of Japanese writing might be one reason. Written Japanese can sometimes be hard to understand when read aloud, as a lot of meaning is conveyed by the written characters themselves—most often by the kanji used, which frequently distinguish between different words with the same pronunciation, but also by the stylistic choice of whether to write a word in hiragana, katakana, or kanji.
- mcc1ane 6y agoJapanese-speaking people have trouble understanding each other?
- PEJOE 6y agoI think he is saying that in writing, Japanese allows you to be expressive in ways that take advantage of the written medium, and a spoken version of the same text loses those text-only expressive features.
- Nullabillity 6y agoSounds more like a divergence between written and spoken Japanese.
- tkgally 6y ago> Japanese-speaking people have trouble understanding each other? Probably no more so than speakers of other languages. What I meant is that written Japanese often conveys information that will be lost if the text is read aloud as it is written, as words written differently are often pronounced the same. English has similar cases, such as “right,” “write,” and “rite.” But Japanese has many, many more. For example, the words 壮観, 送還, 相姦, 相関, 相観, 挿管, 創刊, and 総監 are all pronounced sōkan, but they mean, respectively, a grand sight, repatriation, incest, correlation, physiognomy, intubation, start of publication, and inspector general. When the words are seen, their meaning is immediately clear. When they are heard, the listener must infer which meaning is intended from the context, and often the context is insufficient. Radio announcers, when reading aloud a text, will sometimes explain the kanji with which a word was written. Audiobook narrators probably don’t feel they have the authority to do so.
- kadrian12 6y agoKatakana, to me, is such a trouble. I really wonder whether I'm the only one who believes that Katakana is a big part of the reason, why it's very hard for native Japanese speakers to learn English. In a Japan of today, you grow up with a plentitude of words taken from English and written + pronounced in Katakana. So you learn to pronounce "san-do-i-chi" for sandwich, "de-za-i-na" for "designer", "su-ma-ho" for smartphone, "ca-re-n-da" for calendar. And since you use and pronounce them wrongly on a daily basis you reinforce the Japanesified pronunciations. Then, actually pronouncing "calendar" in an English way becomes tricky. So to me, the alphabets are a great example of a "historically grown" system, that's ripe for a "refactoring".
- emodendroket 6y agoI think this is kind of backwards. Japanese just has a restrictive phonetic system that makes it awkward to borrow English words. It’s unlikely that if it were written differently they’d pronounce the words more like English.
- earthboundkid 6y agoEnglish has an alphabet, but we still slaughter the pronunciation of harakiri, karaoke, and kamikaze because our phonology demands it. The one Japanese word we pronounce okay is "tsunami" which has a sound we don't have, lol!
- supuun 6y agoYeah, good point. Some more: anime, manga, samurai.
- andrewzah 6y agoUnlikely. English and Japanese have different phonetics. The writing system just reflects the spoken language. Korean has this same problem. Ice cream becomes ah-ee-suh kr-ee-muh, etc. I don't know very much Japanese but I believe it's even worse for Korean in this regard.
- supuun 6y agointeresting perspective, but more important reason in my opinion is that Japanese has so simple pronunciation (many vowels and fewer sounds all together), so Japanese people are not accustomed to making those difficult sounds that are in English.
- momo93 6y agoÉmilie Rigaud's work is amazing.
- kazinator 6y agoOMG, I read 藩, cold: "han" feudal domain. I did stare at it for a second or three, but got it. I added it to my vocabulary maybe a year-and-a-half ago? It, and words that include it, are not such common words. How/why did he choose that for the example, I wonder. For that matter, how did I add it? It was due to some recursive chasing of words in a dictionary, where some word's older meaning was being explained as relating to some feudal situations in the Edo period, and that explanation used 藩 in it. Evidently, I have reviewed it 24 times. The fact that it contains 番 ("ban", number in a series, turn, ...) helps a lot.
- Clewza313 6y agoI suspect the author meant to use 漢 (as in hanzi/kanji), and keyed in the wrong one instead.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- EmilieTypo 6y agoAnswer from the author of the article herself : No no, I put the kanji 藩 on purpose, because I love this kanji! It is a beautiful one I think :)
- pm215 6y agoCommonness depends on your reading material, of course -- if you read Japanese novels set in the feudal era you'll trip over 藩 all the time :-)
- andrewzah 6y agoI'm glad to see I'm not the only one that does this. I write down Korean word definitions in Korean, and this usually leads me to a whole bunch of niche words.
- piercebot 6y ago> It is hard for me to read a text that is set only in hiragana (as in the Japanese version of Animal crossing on Switch for example, the characters only speaks in kana, with no spacing separating words... I'm very curious as to why Nintendo made this choice! Is it because the game is designed to be welcoming to children? In which case, why not use furigana and use it as an opportunity to learn Kanji though repetition? Is it supposed to reflect the simplicity of a back-to-nature lifestyle and the characters therein? I'm inclined to suspect is the latter of the two; especially if kana is only employed in character speech while other parts of the game use Kanji. Has anybody played the Japanese version? Can you speak to the use of Kanji in the game?
- sexy_devil 6y ago'Cutscene'y type talks like Tom Nook or Isabelle introducing are in kanji but irc pretty much everything else like items and villager chat is hiragana.
- rangibaby 6y ago> Is it supposed to reflect the simplicity of a back-to-nature lifestyle and the characters therein? I'm inclined to suspect is the latter of the two; especially if kana is only employed in character speech while other parts of the game use Kanji. This, but it’s the other way around. When characters speak to the player, who exists outside of the game world, it is in a mix of kanji and kana. When they write within the game world, it is in kana only.
- jhanschoo 6y agoIt's a genre staple. Up until recently screens were typically too low-res to properly display frequently-used kanji. If they included furigana the furigana might be still too small as well to display them in an aesthetically coherent manner.