Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Man'yōgana (万葉仮名, Japanese pronunciation: [maɰ̃joꜜːɡana] or [maɰ̃joːɡana]) is an ancient writing system that uses Chinese characters to represent the Japanese language. It was the first known kana system to be developed as a means to represent the Japanese language phonetically. The date of the earliest usage of this type of ...
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
As a result of the aforementioned lack of a Japanese writing system, Chinese was used almost exclusively in texts. The Heian period (794–1185) facilitated the emergence of a system known as kanbun , which involved the use of Chinese text with diacritical marks that allowed Japanese speakers to read and restructure Chinese sentences.
A morphogram is the representation of a morpheme by a grapheme based solely on its meaning. Kanji is a writing system that makes use of morphograms, where Chinese characters were borrowed to represent native morphemes because of their meanings. Thus, a single character can represent a variety of morphemes which originally all had the same meaning.
Kanji (漢字, pronounced ⓘ) are the logographic Chinese characters adapted from the Chinese script used in the writing of Japanese. [1] They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequently-derived syllabic scripts of hiragana and katakana.
' explanatory reading ' [1] [a]) is the way of reading kanji characters using the native Japanese word that matches the meaning of the Chinese character when it was introduced. [2] [3] [4] This pronunciation is contrasted with on'yomi, which is the reading based on the original Chinese pronunciation of the character.
Hiragana originated as simplified forms of similar-sounding Chinese characters. Hiragana character shapes were derived from Chinese cursive script (sōsho). Shown here is a sample of cursive script by 7th century calligrapher Sun Guoting. Note the character 為 (wei), indicated by the red arrow, closely resembles the hiragana character ゐ (wi).
Pseudo-Chinese involves taking sentences which are grammatically Japanese and stripping away the hiragana and katakana, leaving only the kanji behind. This causes the resultant sentence to appear Chinese. The phenomenon has spread to China, where Chinese speakers can often guess the meaning of the sentences despite not knowing Japanese.