Preface to Japanese Orthography
Most world languages are derivative of languages that came before them, and slowly changed and evolved over time until they reached the present day, and language evolution is constantly underway. Japanese is a very interesting exception in that it is one of the few isolated language families to be commonly used across the world, and to have that many speakers.
Japanese belongs to the Japonic language family, and has mainly evolved and changed only within the borders of the country. For most of Japan’s early history, they did not have a consistent or established writing system, and the majority of the language was used exclusively verbally. This is more than an interesting fact, it’s important to keep in mind when trying to form patterns of thought to your learning, for a good amount of Japanese language history was contingent on the language being primarily spoken, with little usage written.
During the 5th and 6th Centuries, Japanese scholars adopted the Chinese writing system, marking a huge change in the history, documentation, and cultural influence of Japan. This is present in modern day Kanji, which resembles a striking similarity to even today’s modern Simplified Chinese, and even more so to the Traditional Chinese writing system. This influence of the Chinese language and the Chinese writing system has shaped the Japanese language significantly.
The Japanese Writing System, an overview
Modern Japanese is made of three primary orthographic components:
Hiragana
Katakana
and Kanji
All three of these writing components work in harmony to give meaning to Japanese sentences, and each serve a very important role in the function of writing in Japanese.
Hiragana and Katakana are considered Syllabaries, or a collection of glyphs where each character represents one sound, which usually does not change in respect to the characters around them. This differs from an Alphabet, where characters like “a”, “e”, “c”, or “s” can change in pronunciation from word to word.
Hiragana ひらがな
Hiragana are the round, flowing, stylistic characters of the Japanese language. They serve as the scaffolding of the basic sentence, giving detailed yet highly important meaning toward context, intent, and expression. All words can be written entirely in Hiragana, and all Japanese pronunciation can also be expressed in Hiragana. Hiragana is a syllabary of 48 symbols.
Hiragana serve the purpose of being Particles, Conjunctions, specify Conjugations, and can express Nouns that are usually written in kana, mostly to spare the reader or writer from difficult Kanji.
Katakana カタカナ
Katakana are the more straight-lined, stronger looking characters, which serve primarily the same function as Hiragana, with some main differences. Katakana is the same syllabary as Hiragana, with the same number of characters. It is essentially the same syllabary, just written in different glyphs.
As opposed to being structural characters, Katakana are used to write out words adopted from other languages (where Kanji may not exist), like アメリカ (America) or my name ニコラス (Nicholas). Katakana are also used to express intentional pronunciation clues in place of Hiragana, like you may see in a dictionary that the Chinese pronunciation of a Kanji is expressed in Katakana as opposed to the Japanese pronunciation of a Kanji, expressed in Hiragana. Katakana may also be used in place of Kanji when the format doesn’t allow for them, like in retro games where low-resolution is not a good option for writing complex Kanji.
Kanji 漢字
Kanji is the derived Chinese characters that are used to give meaning to almost all Nouns, Verbs, and most other non-grammar parts of the sentence. There are easily more than 50,000 Kanji in existence, but only 2,136 of them are taught as required learning Kanji in the primary and secondary school system. These are referred to as the 常用漢字 (Jouyou Kanji), or Everyday Use Kanji.
Kanji’s pronunciation can be written in Hiragana or Katakana, as those syllabaries can express every possible phenom, or unit of sound, in the language. While the Hiragana and Katakana represent the pronunciation, Kanji gives the meaning behind the word.
I will go into more detail on how Kanji are written, their purpose, and how to construct words with Kanji in a later post, but for now know that Kanji are a pretty important part of the language.
So… What’s the point of Kanji?
Great question. If we could express everything perfectly fine in Hiragana and Katakana, what’s the purpose of Kanji? Doesn’t that seem like a totally unnecessary step in the learning process?
Well, there are a few considerations to make when we ask that question before we can get to answering it. First, all Hiragana and Katakana are derivative of Kanji. This means that Kanji has been around in the language far longer than their easier to remember counterparts. The foundation of the written language is Kanji, so it’s pretty hard to separate them. Hiragana came about when people started writing Kanji faster, more cursive, and more loosely. Convention turned into a formal system when the government recognized that the most commonly used cursive Kanji could be used to represent sentence structure in a formalized way. Katakana came about earlier than Hiragana, when scholars wanted a way to denote how specific Kanji were pronounced, making a more formalized system to how Kanji were supposed to be pronounced in a system almost entirely derivative of Chinese.
Now to answer why we really can’t remove Kanji from the modern Japanese system, there are a few significant reasons, one being: Homophones! Since Japanese only has 48 syllabic characters and a theoretically infinite number of words to represent, where a lot of words were borrowed from Chinese, there are bound to be a number of words with the exact same pronunciation.
A few examples:
はし can represent the words 橋(bridge)、端(cliff)、箸(chopsticks)
かみ can represent the words 神(god)、紙(paper)、髪(hair)、噛み(bite)、加味(seasoning)
しか can represent the words 鹿(deer)、歯科(dentistry)、史家(historian)、詩歌(poetry)
Another reason in simply tradition. People are used to having Kanji, seeing it in their daily lives, living around and reading/writing with Kanji all the time. It would be a major change to the culture and lifestyle of people if Kanji were to be completely removed from the language, which is something many people are hesitant over.
Those are just a few reasons, but I hope it can highlight the importance of Kanji in Japanese. When listening, we can use context clues and pitch accent (I’ll explain that later) to help differentiate which word the speaker is referring to, but in writing, it’s so much easier to just see the Kanji which represent exactly what the meaning is supposed to be.
I think that’s enough information for now, with that introduction, we can get into learning the Orthography!
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