Japanese writing system basics • Hacker News Board

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#61

Post by bunderbunder » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:26 AM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #30

Ancient Pictographic (before Paleo) Hebrew is like this too. Except they only have 22 letters, there's a 23rd but it is no longer part of the 'Aleph Bet'. Hebrew originally had no vowels, and thus today they only put the vowel system in when it's a word people don't normally know how to pronounce. Chinese is similar as well, and I'm sure there's a couple more languages.

Hebrew is an abjad - a writing system where you (mostly) only write the consonants. It's true that, like other very ancient writing systems such as Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs, the letters are pictoral, but functionally it's still more like an alphabet than anything else.

Far from being like this, the only major kind of writing that Japanese doesn't use is an abjad. It uses logograms (kanji, like what this article shows), two different kinds of syllabary (hiragana and katakana), and an alphabet (romaji - the Latin alphabet).

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#62

Post by jacobolus » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:26 AM UTC

gizmo686 wrote: post #41

rett12 wrote: post #25

Sometimes I wonder if all these people that criticize or that think that a Latin alphabet can be adapted seamlessly to all languages have tried to study past a beginner level any logographic language.

I have studied Japanese, and still think that a logographic writing system was a mistake. Consider the time and effort it takes for native speakers to become literate. I also think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese, which does not contain any sounds that do not have an obvious equivalent in English, and even if it did, we could always repurpose a character or sequence of characters for that so…

> I also do not think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese, [...]

You stuck an extra “do not” in your sentence

* * *

As far as alphabets go, the Phoenician/Greek/Etruscan/Latin alphabet is pretty ad hoc and mediocre. But hey, it’s what we know. At this point, I think we’re stuck with it.

Similar story for modern Hindu/Arabic/European numeral glyphs. Learning arithmetic would be noticeably simpler if the glyphs expressed some of the symmetries of the number system. Alas.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#63

Post by cynix » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:27 AM UTC

gizmo686 wrote: post #22

andreygrehov wrote: post #7

I liked the beginning and expected the next word after "mouth" to look almost the same, with a subtle change, which would be a logical extension. But it was quite a jump from a simple square (口) to god-knows-what (食). Also, why 食 is translated as "Eclipse" in Google?

That is not wrong, but weird to give as a first definition. The word "食" can mean either food or eclipse. In both cases it is read the same way; so I assume this happened because they did not have a symbol for eclipse so decided to use a homophone. http://jisho.org/search/%E9%A3%9F

I thought the original character for eclipse is 蝕, but people got lazy and started using a more common character with the same pronunciation.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#64

Post by shasheene » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:27 AM UTC

andreygrehov wrote: post #7

I liked the beginning and expected the next word after "mouth" to look almost the same, with a subtle change, which would be a logical extension. But it was quite a jump from a simple square (口) to god-knows-what (食). Also, why 食 is translated as "Eclipse" in Google?

If anyone is interested in this kind of etymology, academic Kenneth Henshall has written 'A Guide To Remembering Japanese Characters' which contains the etymologies for the ~2000 general use Kanji. Over the millennia of evolution of the characters, some characters have multiple disputed etymologies which are still unresolved by the academics who study the history.

For the record, 食 is a pictogram of a small amount of food (the "roof" looking thing) stacked on a heavily stylized pictogram of a kind of table or plate (do an image search for 'takatsuki table'). It's claimed the Japanese word for bean 豆, has an older stylization of the same takatsuki table with a little bit of food at the top.

From a learning to read and memorization perspective, most people will probably find doing Look/Cover/Write/Check type drills (either manually or with a spaced repetition flashcard program like Anki) much more effective than using mnemonics based on (sometimes very complex) etymology.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#65

Post by zatkin » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:31 AM UTC

Aren't we sort of starting to doing this with the introduction of emojis? They're a little bit ambiguous, but they do have meaning behind them, nonetheless. ‍️

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#66

Post by zorceta » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:31 AM UTC

chewxy wrote: post #56

zorceta wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a very good choice to use "食” to represent "eat" here. In modern Chinese we say "吃", and you can see that "吃" has a square part, which is exactly "口". And "食" also means "food", but "吃" doesn't. Also, since ancient Chinese people thought eclipse was caused by a "dog in the sky" eating the moon, it's reasonable for them to use "食" to describe it. But modern Chinese almost always say "月食", meaning eclipse of t…

When I was younger and took chinese lessons, there was a push to use more "official" chinese. We'd be told that in official use "吃" is a verb used by ghosts (which is to say, it's impolite to use 吃, and "食" was to be used by humans. So... eh YMMV. I personally find that elitist though, but then again, in chinese history there was always a distinction between what the commoner spoke (白话文) and what the intellectual eli…

Didn't know that ghost part.. Fun to know :)

I'm just suggesting from modern Chinese's perspective, because, after all, we are modern people. 文言文 (uh I don't know its English translation) is fun to read and learn, but it's like Latin since basically nobody writes it anymore.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#67

Post by fenomas » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:31 AM UTC

akavi wrote: post #23

rett12 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't work due to the insane amount of homophones. When you are speaking with someone you have context and you can discern the meaning of what it's said. But random words or texts can change it's meaning depending of what character is used. And the tone system doesn't help as it can be seen in Chinese pinyin. For example, how many kanji can be read as 'shuu'/しゅう: http://jisho.org/search/%E3%81%97%E3%82%85%E3%81%…

Why do you have less context in writing than in speech? I'd be willing to bet heavily that the vast majority of those "homophones" are primarily writing-only, domain specific or archaic "shorthands", which are referred to in speech with slightly more verbose alternatives. Switching to a non-character based system would admittedly in that case mean some domain specific writing would be slightly less compact, but that…

> I'd be willing to bet heavily that ...

You'd lose your bet. In that "shuu" link as an example, most (10-12 or so) are common enough that you might hear them in a typical newscast, with that pronunciation.

What makes things manageable is the combinatorics. E.g. there are dozens of kanji read "shuu", and many dozens more read "kan", but most of them are only read that way when part of a 2-character compound, and only a small subset of the possible "shuukan"s are words, and only a subset of those words are common in spoken conversation.

Even then, it is a very homophone-heavy language. I can think of four "shuukan"s off the top of my head that you might hear from a newsreader; it would only be after those that you'd get into domain-specific words. This is pretty typical.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#68

Post by gleenn » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:32 AM UTC

biot wrote: post #6

ChuckMcM wrote: post #2

Ok, thats a fun hack.

A hack for learning Japanese, or a hack for getting inadvertent upvotes? :) I seem to recall there were books that used that style of progressive foreign language learning, where they started out replacing a single word and then kept replacing more and more until, at the end, the entire story was written in the foreign language.

What do they call that kind of book? I think that'd be an awesome way to learn Japanese.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#69

Post by chaostheory » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:32 AM UTC

ggreer wrote: post #32

bootload wrote: post #4

@bemmu is that a square symbol or something else?

It's the kanji for mouth. Depending on context, it can be pronounced "kuchi", "guchi", or "kou". That's the big problem with logographic writing systems: there's no connection between the symbol and the sound. Japanese lets you fall-back to phonetic alphabet, but other languages (Chinese) don't have that feature. Still, that was a fun post to read.

It's also hanzi character for mouth, the Chinese ideograph system that Kanji is derived from

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#70

Post by chewxy » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:32 AM UTC

shasheene wrote: post #64

andreygrehov wrote: post #7

I liked the beginning and expected the next word after "mouth" to look almost the same, with a subtle change, which would be a logical extension. But it was quite a jump from a simple square (口) to god-knows-what (食). Also, why 食 is translated as "Eclipse" in Google?

If anyone is interested in this kind of etymology, academic Kenneth Henshall has written 'A Guide To Remembering Japanese Characters' which contains the etymologies for the ~2000 general use Kanji. Over the millennia of evolution of the characters, some characters have multiple disputed etymologies which are still unresolved by the academics who study the history. For the record, 食 is a pictogram of a small amount of…

The etymology of 食 is a bit more complex than that. It's ancient chinese that combined an upside down mouth: 亼 (best approximation) and a bowl of rice. This is the 甲骨文 version: http://imgur.com/NRBoG7F. Cute eh? It looks like someone nomnomnoming a bowl of rice.

EDIT: found another one: http://imgur.com/BsQsNBb