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Many East Asian scripts can be written horizontally or vertically. Chinese characters, Korean hangul, and Japanese kana may be oriented along either axis, as they consist mainly of disconnected logographic or syllabic units, each occupying a square block of space, thus allowing for flexibility for which direction texts can be written, be it horizontally from left-to-right, horizontally from ...
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.
Kanji (漢字, Japanese pronunciation:) 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.
Kanbun, literally "Chinese writing," refers to a genre of techniques for making Chinese texts read like Japanese, or for writing in a way imitative of Chinese. For a Japanese, neither of these tasks could be accomplished easily because of the two languages' different structures. As I have mentioned, Chinese is an isolating language.
The Chinese characters chosen to write syllables with the Old Japanese vowel a suggest that it was an open unrounded vowel /a/. [51] The vowel u was a close back rounded vowel /u/, unlike the unrounded /ɯ/ of Modern Standard Japanese. [52] Several hypotheses have been advanced to explain the A/B distinctions made in man'yōgana.
East Asian typography is the application of typography to the writing systems used for the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese languages. Scripts represented in East Asian typography include Chinese characters , kana , and hangul .
In Japanese, Chinese characters are referred to as kanji. Beginning in the Nara period (710–794), readers and writers of kanbun —the Japanese term for Literary Chinese writing—began employing a system of reading techniques and annotations called kundoku. When reading, Japanese speakers would adapt the syntax and vocabulary of Literary ...
In some cases, the Chinese reading is the inferred Chinese reading, interpreting the character as a phono-semantic compound (as in how on readings are sometimes assigned to these characters in Chinese), while, in other cases (such as 働), the Japanese on reading is borrowed (in general this differs from the modern Chinese pronunciation of this ...