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Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

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Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#21

Post by Clewza313 »

Jonnax wrote: post #17
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #12

I 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 th…

Just 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"

Well, 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

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

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#22

Post by ekianjo »

Clewza313 wrote: post #19
wodenokoto wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You 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.

It'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).

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.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#23

Post by ekianjo »

GolDDranks wrote: post #16
Freak_NL wrote: post #2

The 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 did a MA of East Asian Studies at Helsinki University, and our professor ( 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…

> 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 .

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#24

Post by ekianjo »

euske wrote: post #13

What'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.…

> Names are serious business!

It's also serious because names are accepted as signature using hanko (official stamps) for official business and procedures.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#25

Post by phonon »

gioele wrote: post #14
euske wrote: post #13

What'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.…

> 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

They're not in JIS X 0213, so don't expect them to be widely available any time soon...

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#26

Post by Jonnax »

Clewza313 wrote: post #21
Jonnax wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just 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"

Well, 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： http…

It could be argued that Chinese has a lot more characters to learn if you're including the Nanori (Readings used in Names) for 生.

If you take a language like English, it's still arguable that you'd need 12 years worth of schooling to do an advanced test.

Kanji Kentei seems to ask esoteric things at level 2. So it's a test of fluency of not only the Kanji but the language.

How would an English learner fare with Shakespeare or reading a book like Finnegans Wake?

I don't know if there's any data about this. But I think what would be a good study is the level of native proficiency in languages around the world.

Does languages considered simpler result in a greater mastery by the general population?

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#27

Post by Kelamir »

Freak_NL wrote: post #2

The 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.…

One can refer to Chinese characters as hanzi.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#28

Post by WildParser »

Jonnax wrote: post #17
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #12

I 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 th…

Just 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"

When learning a bit of Japanese to me it was quite obvious that the script was most likely intentionally left (or made) complicated. By using a normal alphabet that actually fits to the structure of Japanese language it would be just another ordinary language to learn.

Using a syllables-script for an ending grammar just doesn't make sense. Using 2 syllable scripts is just strange.

It most likely helped the leaders there to stay in control. Without native Japanese translators foreigners are unable to get very far.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#29

Post by visarga »

Freak_NL wrote: post #18
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #12

I 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 th…

> Attempts such as Esperanto and others were never carried out with enough skills or resources. That is a dubious claim. The truth of the matter is that there is no economic benefit in learning Esperanto over learning English as a second language, and (comparatively) very little cultural benefit. Learning English unlocks a vast world of literature, media, and communication in addition to the basic marketable skill it…

It's even harder to learn a universal language if you can always turn to Google Translate.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#30

Post by tkgally »

A 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.

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