Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
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Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
1–10 of 131 posts
Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
#2The 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'm glad the Japanese writing system survived the first waves of digitization (at which point a vocal group of people worldwide was willing to sacrifice cultural artefacts and linguistic finesse for the sake of modernization) and in time put its own mark on things like character encoding and the technical capabilities of fonts on computers.
Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
#3Wow. Hentaigana is not a word that has aged well.
Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
#4The 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 essay feels like something written in the 1970s.
Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
#5I read parts of the article, and skimmed the rest, and almost spat water at my screen when I read the last section:
> Hentaigana : beauties
>
> The word hentaigana is made of kana, — syllabic elements —, and hentai [...]
Here she (?) is referring to 変体 and not 変態. Earlier in the article she said "[j]apanese language is a very playful language" but I don't think she's thinking of homonyms. :-)
Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
#6The 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.
Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
#7The 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
Ah, that would explain it.
Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
#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 katakana came later.
To confuse things even more, 此処 is valid Chinese as well, but the pronunciation is unrelated, they just mapped the meaning on top. This is also fairly common, to the point that there's a technical term for it (jukujikun).
Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
#9Wow. Hentaigana is not a word that has aged well.
It's a different hentai: 変体 "variant form", not 変態 "abnormal, perverse".
Bukkake soba (cold noodles with a splash of sauce) also continues to exist despite English adopting a rather different meaning for the word.
Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms
#10Reading this reminding me of Modern Digital Publishing and Layout still largely ignores vertical text. [1], and that is especially true on the Web.
[1] https://atadistance.net/2019/10/20/japanese-text-layout-for-...