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Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

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Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#31

Post by DocTomoe »

gerikson wrote: post #6
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.…

The 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

Some 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.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#32

Post by johnwalkr »

ekianjo wrote: post #24
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.

I used ヲ instead of ウォ in my name in my hanko. It’s katakana, not hentaigana but you don’t see it except in old documents when they used to use katakana for particles (it’s equivalent to を). Saving the extra character meant I could get it made in ten minutes instead of one day. It sometimes gets comments when I use it.

By the way, there’s no requirement that your hanko matches your name and they only need to be registered for large purchases, like a house or for business use. They are however kept on record by your bank and sometimes compared digitally. By law foreigners can always use a signature instead of hanko but it’s not recommended as the comparison will often fail. On the other hand, online banking ans ATMs are good enough now that it’s been a good five years since I set foot in a bank.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#33

Post by smohare »

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.…

Sinograph 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/

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#34

Post by johnwalkr »

ekianjo wrote: post #20
Clewza313 wrote: post #8

> 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 ka…

> To confuse things even more, 此処 is valid Chinese as well There's a lot more in common between the writing in Taiwan and Japan since Taiwan kept the "older" kanji while the CCP went thru the cultural revolution and the simplification of the number of strokes in each sign. Still, there's a bunch of stuff that kind of looks like it would make sense when reading a Chinese word in Japanese, but turns out there's a lot o…

Super interesting topic. Sometimes Japan uses the simplified version, or somewhat in between. Off the top of my head I only can think of 学/學.

There’s a handful of kanji created in Japan (called) kokuji, mostly food related. Some of these made it back to China. And there are a few differences based on simple mistakes, for example a Chinese character mistakenly applied to the wrong species of fish.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#35

Post by mcc1ane »

tkgally wrote: post #30

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 Engli…

Japanese-speaking people have trouble understanding each other?

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#36

Post by rational_indian »

ekianjo wrote: post #23
GolDDranks wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

I'd say good riddance. Why saddle yourself with this abomination?

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#37

Post by PEJOE »

mcc1ane wrote: post #35
tkgally wrote: post #30

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 Engli…

Japanese-speaking people have trouble understanding each other?

I 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.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#38

Post by Nullabillity »

mcc1ane wrote: post #35
tkgally wrote: post #30

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 Engli…

Japanese-speaking people have trouble understanding each other?

Sounds more like a divergence between written and spoken Japanese.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#39

Post by scaladev »

ekianjo wrote: post #20
Clewza313 wrote: post #8

> 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 ka…

> To confuse things even more, 此処 is valid Chinese as well There's a lot more in common between the writing in Taiwan and Japan since Taiwan kept the "older" kanji while the CCP went thru the cultural revolution and the simplification of the number of strokes in each sign. Still, there's a bunch of stuff that kind of looks like it would make sense when reading a Chinese word in Japanese, but turns out there's a lot o…

>there's a bunch of stuff that kind of looks like it would make sense when reading a Chinese word in Japanese, but turns out there's a lot of meanings are very different

As someone who knows nothing of the Japanese language beyond the very basics, I found these videos quite entertaining:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E6vHCT0wpw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzJqXd-1dEU

It looks like many characters are familiar to his respondents, but their combinations make absolutely no sense.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#40

Post by 1_player »

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"

That does not mean it's not complicated either.
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