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Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

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Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#41

Post by johnwalkr »

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…

You may see the merit of it in a year or so. Spelling and pronunciation is unambiguous (at least for kana where there’s no chance to misread). It’s really hard to read pure kana because you have to process a lot of homophones although I guess that’s surmountable because it mostly works for spoken language. You do however see even native speakers explain which word they mean by signing the kanji, from time to time. And it’s a nice feature to see a new word for the first time and know how to read it (you can guess based on the radicals pretty accurately) and an approximation of its meaning.

Absolute peak language for puns and dad jokes, too.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#42

Post by Freak_NL »

Kelamir wrote: post #27
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.

Only when referring to the Chinese characters as used in Chinese.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#43

Post by xelxebar »

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.…

My experience lies on the artice author's side of this discussion.

Read some original Mishima or Dazai and they use kanji for words that modern novelists generally don't. Pick up some late Edo texts and the kaji-to-kana ratio is even greater still.

More mundanely though, if you consider typical text messages or random notes in a notebook, it's really common for words to "make the leap from kanji to kana" simply due to laziness/convenience/whatever.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#44

Post by lmm »

johnwalkr wrote: post #32
ekianjo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 regis…

> 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.

There is a requirement for it to match your name (or registered alias) if you want to register it as a 実印, no?

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#45

Post by innocenat »

lmm wrote: post #44
johnwalkr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 regis…

> 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. There is a requirement for it to match your name (or registered alias) if you want to register it as a 実印, no?

GP seems to be talking about 銀行印

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#46

Post by tkgally »

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?

> 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.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#47

Post by frivoal »

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…

I'd speculate differently. Americans commute by car, audiobooks are convenient to read while driving. Japanese commute by train, which is much more suitable to looking at a book (paper or electronic).

Also, Manga is massively popular, and that form doesn't covert well (or at all) to audiobook.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#48

Post by xelxebar »

johnwalkr wrote: post #34
ekianjo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Just to add to this, simplified forms are mostly confined to Joyo kanji. The old forms do, however, exert their existence even in modern kanji as sub-pieces of (mostly rarer) other kanji---e.g. 専 used to be written 專, which still exists as the right half of 慱.

Also, there are lots of cases where the "simple" modern form doesn't really seem all that much simpler when viewing it in a typeface. My ad-hoc hypothesis is that these simplifications were considered with handrwiting in mind, e.g. 戻 (modern) vs. 戾 (original).

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#49

Post by Jonnax »

WildParser wrote: post #28
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"

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 th…

What you've said is nonsensical.

A good example of the phrase "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing"

The language is structured around those two syllable letters.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#50

Post by whym »

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.…

住民基本台帳収録変体仮名 (jūmin kihon daichō shūroku hentaigana, or Jūki-gana for short) is the character set specifically made for the administrative purposes of those local government registrars. I don't know what the actual computer system used there is based on, but it looks like Tron Code and Super Kanji support the character set. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Juki-Gana

The thing about hentaigana is that it's more or less an open set. I don't think there is the standard set of hentaigana that scholars agree upon. At a quick glance, juki-gana does not seem to be identical to Unicode's hentaigana set (https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1B000.pdf), although I'm sure the intersection is non-empty.

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