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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.
Many of them were created during the Meiji Restoration to translate non-Asian concepts and have been reborrowed into Chinese. Kango is also to be distinguished from gairaigo of Chinese origin, namely words borrowed from modern Chinese dialects, some of which may be occasionally spelled with Chinese characters or kanji just like kango.
Chinese characters "Chinese character" written in traditional (left) and simplified (right) forms Script type Logographic Time period c. 13th century BCE – present Direction Left-to-right Top-to-bottom, columns right-to-left Languages Chinese Japanese Korean Vietnamese Zhuang (among others) Related scripts Parent systems (Proto-writing) Chinese characters Child systems Bopomofo Jurchen ...
The list also offers a table of correspondences between 2,546 Simplified Chinese characters and 2,574 Traditional Chinese characters, along with other selected variant forms. This table replaced all previous related standards, and provides the authoritative list of characters and glyph shapes for Simplified Chinese in China.
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.
On'yomi (音読み, , lit. "sound(-based) reading"), or the Sino-Japanese reading, is the reading of a kanji based on the historical Chinese pronunciation of the character. A single kanji might have multiple on'yomi pronunciations, reflecting the Chinese pronunciations of different periods or regions.
The common Chinese word wú (無) was adopted in the Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, and Sino-Vietnamese vocabularies. The Japanese kanji 無 has on'yomi readings of mu or bu, and a kun'yomi (Japanese reading) of na. It is a fourth-grade kanji. [3] The Korean hanja 無 is read mu (in Revised, McCune–Reischauer, and Yale romanization systems).
Wasei-kango (Japanese: 和製漢語, "Japanese-made Chinese words") are those words in the Japanese language composed of Chinese morphemes but invented in Japan rather than borrowed from China. Such terms are generally written using kanji and read according to the on'yomi pronunciations of the characters.