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The Japanese script reform is the attempt to correlate standard spoken Japanese with the written word, which began during the Meiji period. This issue is known in Japan as the kokugo kokuji mondai ( 国語国字問題 , national language and script problem) .
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.
Shinjitai (Japanese: 新字体, "new character form") are the simplified forms of kanji used in Japan since the promulgation of the Tōyō Kanji List in 1946. Some of the new forms found in shinjitai are also found in simplified Chinese characters, but shinjitai is generally not as extensive in the scope of its modification.
After the Meiji Restoration and as Japan entered an era of active exchange with foreign countries, the need for script reform in Japan began to be called for. Some scholars argued for the abolition of kanji and the writing of Japanese using only kana or Latin characters.
For example, in Japan, 必 is written with the top dot first, while the traditional stroke order writes the 丿 first. In the characters 王 and 玉, the vertical stroke is the third stroke in Chinese, but the second stroke in Japanese. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau use traditional characters, though with an altered stroke order.
Unlike in the People's Republic of China, where all personal names were simplified as part of the character simplification reform carried out in the 1950s, the Japanese reform applied only to a subset of the characters in use (the tōyō kanji) and excluded characters used in proper names.
The historical kana orthography (歴史的仮名遣い, rekishiteki kanazukai), or old orthography (旧仮名遣い, kyū kanazukai), refers to the kana orthography (正仮名遣い, sei kana-zukai) in general use until orthographic reforms after World War II; the current orthography was adopted by Cabinet order in 1946. [1]
Historically, some kokuji date back to very early Japanese writing, being found in the Man'yōshū, for example— 鰯 iwashi "sardine" dates to the Nara period (8th century)—while they have continued to be created as late as the late 19th century, when a number of characters were coined in the Meiji era for new scientific concepts.