Bryce Martin

COMM 1020

Hello everybody, today as your teacher I think I want to teach you all about Japanese Kanji
and kana. Everybody looks excited dont you all? Lets begin.

We are going to take a look at the evolution of the Japanese writing system and how it can physically and
conceptually represent ideas.

The language was built upon imported Chinese characters called Kanji

I. Kana is the phonetic 'alphabet' unique to Japanese

A. Kana is broken into two sets (Hadamitzky)

i. Hiragana

ii. Katakana

B. What are the kana used for? (Hadamitzky)

ii. Hiragana is used to write nouns, verbs, and adjectives when corresponding kanji has
become obsolete, along with inflectional endings of words written in kanji and particles.

i. Katakana is used to represent foreign words and names, along with plants
and animals (scientifically with a few exceptions), onomatopoeic
words and FOR EMPHASIS

C. How did kana come about? (Hadamitzky)

i. Katakana was used by men as a freehand note-taking system

iI. Hiragana originated from women because they weren't formally

taught how to read and write kanji, so they derived hiragana from kanji solely
based on phonetics in order to write womans hand as compared to mans
hand (Sanseido)

But where did the Kana come from?

II. Kanji is the mother of Kana, and an integral part of the Japanese writing system.

A. Kanji was adopted from China (Hadamitzky)

i. In Japanese, Kanji pronunciations were used rather than their actual

meaning
 ii. Meanings of characters were eventually adopted as well to simplify writing
and to save time

B. Kanji came to represent ideas rather than phonetics

i. Some Kanji are simplified sketches and illustrations or Logograms (Webster)

1. As an example to kanji that look like what they represent represents a

river, represents a mountain, represents a tree, and represents fire

(Shirakawa)

ii. Some Kanji are abstractions or combinations of simpler kanji (Hadamitzky)

1. These abstractions include representing one, representing bright by

merging the characters for the sun and the moon, representing up.

C. How Kanji played an active role in the language

i. Kana are really just simplified Kanji written only to represent the pronunciation

ii. The government commenced a writing reform shortly after WWII (Hadamitzky)

1. The Jouyou (Everyday use) Kanji consists of 2136 characters (Halpern)

2. The Jinmeiyou Kanji consists 985 characters that are used for names only

iii. Kanji have the ability to generate hundreds of thousands of compound words from a

basic stock of a few thousand units (Halpern)

With the combination of Kanji and Kana, Japanese has evolved in way that the writing system can both
physically (through kanji) and conceptually (through kana) represent ideas.

What base is your language built upon in order to represent new ideas?

(Thank you!)
References

Hadamitzky, W., & Spahn, M. (2012). Japanese Kanji and Kana: A complete guide to the Japanese
writing system. Singapore: Tuttle

Shirakawa, S. (1996). Jitsu. Tokyo: Heibonsha. Available from

japanknowledge.com/articles/kanji/column_jitsu_01.html

japanknowledge.com/articles/kanji/column_jitsu_02.html

Halpern, J. (1999). The Kodansha Kanji Learners Dictionary: Revised and expanded (2nd ed.). New York:
Kodansha USA.

(2007). Hiragana. Sanseido Co. Available from

http://daijirin.dual-d.net/extra/hiragana.html

logogram. 2017. In Merriam-Webster.com.

Retrieved June 12, 2017, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/logogram