Kanji
Kanji are logographic Chinese characters, historically adapted from Chinese writing scripts, used in writing of Japanese. They comprised a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used today, along with the subsequently derived syllabic scripts of and. Most Kanji characters have two pronunciations: kun'yomi, based on the sounds of vernacular Japanese, where the Kanji is often phonetically transcribed with furigana; and on'yomi, based on the imitation of the original Middle Chinese sound when it was borrowed from written Chinese. Some Kanji characters were indigenously invented in Japan by constructing character components derived from other Chinese characters.
After the Meiji Restoration, Japan made its own efforts to simplify the Kanji characters, now known as, by a process similar to China's simplification efforts, with the intention to increase literacy among the general public. Since the 1920s, the Japanese government has published character lists periodically to help direct the education of its citizenry through the myriad Chinese characters that exist. There are nearly 3,000 kanji used in Japanese names and in common communication.
The term is a direct borrowing and phonetic reading of the Chinese word hanzi, which is one of the formal terms used when referring to Chinese characters. The significant use of Chinese characters in Japan first began to take hold around the 5th century AD and has since had a profound influence in shaping Japanese culture, language, literature, history, and records. Inkstone artifacts at archaeological sites dating back to the earlier Yayoi period were also found to contain Chinese characters.
Although some characters, as used in Japanese and Chinese, have similar meanings and pronunciations, others have meanings or pronunciations that are unique to one language or the other. For example, means 'honest' in both languages but is pronounced or in Japanese, and in Standard Mandarin Chinese. Individual kanji characters and multi-kanji words invented in Japan from Chinese morphemes have been borrowed into Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese in recent times. These are known as Wasei-kango, or Japanese-made Chinese words. For example, the word for telephone, in Japanese, was derived from the Chinese words for "electric" and "conversation." It was then calqued as in Mandarin Chinese, điện thoại in Vietnamese and 전화 in Korean.
History
s first came to Japan on official seals, letters, swords, coins, mirrors, and other decorative items imported from China. The earliest known instance of such an import was the King of Na gold seal given by Emperor Guangwu of Han to a Wa emissary in 57 AD. Chinese coins as well as inkstones from the first century AD have also been found in Yayoi period archaeological sites. However, the Japanese people of that era probably had little to no comprehension of the script, and they would remain relatively illiterate until the fifth century AD, when writing in Japan became more widespread. According to the Nihon Shoki and Kojiki, a semi-legendary scholar called Wani was dispatched to Japan by the Kingdom of Baekje during the reign of Emperor Ōjin in the early fifth century, bringing with him knowledge of Confucianism and Chinese characters.The earliest Japanese documents were probably written by bilingual Chinese or Korean officials employed at the Yamato court. For example, the diplomatic correspondence from King Bu of Wa to Emperor Shun of Liu Song in 478 AD has been praised for its skillful use of allusion. Later, groups of people called were organized under the monarch to read and write Classical Chinese. During the reign of Empress Suiko, the Yamato court began sending full-scale diplomatic missions to China, which resulted in a large increase in Chinese literacy at the Japanese court.
In ancient times, paper was so rare that people wrote kanji onto thin, rectangular strips of wood, called . These wooden boards were used for communication between government offices, tags for goods transported between various countries, and the practice of writing. The oldest written kanji in Japan discovered so far were written in ink on wood as a wooden strip dated to the 7th century, a record of trading for cloth and salt.
The Japanese language had no written form at the time Chinese characters were introduced, and texts were written and read only in Chinese. Later, during the Heian period, a system known as emerged, which involved using Chinese text with diacritical marks to allow Japanese speakers to read Chinese sentences and restructure them into Japanese on the fly, by changing word order and adding particles and verb endings, in accordance with the rules of Japanese grammar. This was essentially a kind of codified sight translation.
Chinese characters also came to be used to write texts in the vernacular Japanese language, resulting in the modern syllabaries. Around 650 AD, a writing system called evolved that used a number of Chinese characters for their sound, rather than for their meaning. written in cursive style evolved into , or, that is, "ladies' hand", a writing system that was accessible to women. Major works of Heian-era literature by women were written in. emerged via a parallel path: monastery students simplified to a single constituent element. Thus the two other writing systems, and, referred to collectively as, are descended from kanji. In contrast with , kanji are also called .
In modern Japanese, kanji are used to write certain words or parts of words, while are used to write inflected verb and adjective endings, phonetic complements to disambiguate readings, particles, and miscellaneous words which have no kanji or whose kanji are considered obscure or too difficult to read or remember. are mostly used for representing onomatopoeia, non-Japanese loanwords, the names of plants and animals, and for emphasis on certain words.
Orthographic reform and lists of kanji
Since ancient times, there has been a strong opinion in Japan that kanji is the orthodox form of writing, but others have argued against it. Kamo no Mabuchi, a scholar of the Edo period, criticized the large number of characters in kanji. He also appreciated the small number of characters in characters and argued for the limitation of kanji.After the Meiji Restoration and as Japan entered an era of active exchange with foreign countries, the need for script reform in Japan began to be called for. Some scholars argued for the abolition of kanji and the writing of Japanese using only or Latin characters. These views were not widespread.
However, the need to limit the number of kanji characters was understood, and in May 1923, the Japanese government announced 1,962 kanji characters for regular use. In 1940, the Japanese Army decided on the "Table of Restricted Kanji for Weapons Names" which limited the number of kanji that could be used for weapons names to 1,235. In 1942, the National Language Council announced the "Standard Kanji Table" with a total of 2,528 characters, showing the standard for kanji used by ministries and agencies and in general society.
In 1946, after World War II and under the Allied occupation of Japan, the Japanese government, guided by the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, instituted a series of orthographic reforms, to help children learn and to simplify kanji use in literature and periodicals.
The number of characters in circulation was reduced, and formal lists of characters to be learned during each grade of school were established.
Some characters were given simplified glyphs, called. Many variant forms of characters and obscure alternatives for common characters were officially discouraged.
These are simply guidelines, so many characters outside these standards are still widely known and commonly used; these are known as.
kanji
The are the 1,026 first kanji characters that Japanese children learn in elementary school, from first grade to sixth grade. The grade-level breakdown is known as the, or the. This list of kanji is maintained by the Japanese Ministry of Education and prescribes which kanji characters and which kanji readings students should learn for each grade.kanji
The are 2,136 characters consisting of all the kanji, plus 1,110 additional kanji taught in junior high and high school. In publishing, characters outside this category are often given. The kanji were introduced in 1981, replacing an older list of 1,850 characters known as the, introduced in 1946. Originally numbering 1,945 characters, the kanji list was expanded to 2,136 in 2010. Some of the new characters were previously kanji; some are used to write prefecture names:,,,,,,,,, and.kanji
As of September 25, 2017, the consists of 863 characters. Kanji on this list are mostly used in people's names and some are traditional variants of kanji. There were only 92 kanji in the original list published in 1952, but new additions have been made frequently. Sometimes the term kanji refers to all 2,999 kanji from both the and lists combined.kanji
are any kanji not contained in the kanji and kanji lists. These are generally written using traditional characters, but extended forms exist.Japanese Industrial Standards for kanji
The Japanese Industrial Standards for kanji and define character code-points for each kanji and, as well as other forms of writing such as the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic script, Greek alphabet, Arabic numerals, etc. for use in information processing. They have had numerous revisions. The current standards are:- JIS X 0208, the most recent version of the main standard. It has 6,355 kanji.
- JIS X 0212, a supplementary standard containing a further 5,801 kanji. This standard is rarely used, mainly because the common Shift JIS encoding system could not use it. This standard is effectively obsolete.
- JIS X 0213, a further revision which extended the JIS X 0208 set with 3,695 additional kanji, of which 2,743 were in JIS X 0212. The standard is in part designed to be compatible with Shift JIS encoding.
- JIS X 0221:1995, the Japanese version of the ISO 10646/Unicode standard.