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Hanzi

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KamiNoItte
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QijingShisanpian
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Kanji
    Keywords: Culture & History

MikeNoGo: Kanji are literally "Chinese characters" used in the written Japanese language. They take on their own pronounciation and usage in Japanese, but they often have the same meaning. Japanese terms like "Igo" or "Fuseki" for example are written in Chinese characters but given a Japanese pronounciation.

Fhayashi: Kanji are one of the three scripts used in written Japanese. The other scripts are hiragana and katagana. Literally, kanji is Han (as in dynasty) characters.

While hiragana and katagana are syllabaries (each symbol denoting a syllable), kanji are pictographs - each kanji is a word. Because kanji denotes meaning, it doesn't really tell the reader how to pronounce what is written. Thus, the correct way to say something written in kanji depends on context and arbitrary rules.

Kanji came into use in Japan between 200 BC and 200 AD. One of the stories about the origin of kanji use in Japan involves an old Japanese emperor who's name I don't currently remember sends a team of scholars to China to bring back some culture. They brought back a form of writing, Buddhism, and some architectural styles. Through use and time, all three have evolved from their counterparts in China. Though it's a nice story, I'm sure the geographical proximity to China lead to the diffusion of many aspects of Chinese culture into Japan and other nearby areas.

Though there are some kanji not used in Chinese, and some Chinese pictographs not used in Japanese, Japanese words written in kanji would impart most of their meaning to a Chinese reader, and vice versa - though there could be some differences in meaning.

Charles: If I'm not wrong kanji in Japanese is written the same way as hanzi in Chinese, and means just 'Chinese characters'. So, Chinese characters used for writing Japanese. Since Chinese characters are ideograms, there is no initial problem with this: in English we read '7' as seven, in French it is read as sept and that's no different, with the concept rather than the phonetics being signified.

Complications come in several places. Japanese can have multiple readings for one kanji, often because there are both a Japanese word and a Chinese word (adapted to Japanese pronunciation). The Chinese reading of a single character is a single syllable - not so for Japanese. There are some Japanese kanji that are not standard Chinese characters, such as the kanji for go. And the writing of characters in mainland China has been simplified, so that the Japanese version will now be old-fashioned on that reckoning.

Niklaus: As far as I know (I don't know much about Japanese), kanji are not the same as traditional Chinese characters. They have been simplified as well, but in a different way than the Chinese ones. Because the process of simplification is not entirely arbitrary (most of the simplified characters have been in use as "vulgar" shorthands in China for centuries before they were made official by the communists), there are a lot of similarities. Kanji have been simplified less drastically than the modern Chinese characters, so they are somewhere in between as far as complexity (number of strokes) is concerned.

unkx80: Yah kanji is 汉字, which is simply hanzi. And hanzi simply means Chinese characters. Straight translation. =P

Fhayashi: I'm pretty sure that the above is wrong. It should be the 'Han' from the 'Han dynasty'. It's translated as Chinese because most modern Chinese identify themselves with the Han Chinese. Since kanji came into use in Japan during the Han dynasty in China, the name makes sense.

Tim Brent: Kanji would have come into Japan around the 6th or 7th centuries, around the same time Buddhism and Go did, among other things. This is when Japan started having links with China. The only difference is that in Japan there is only one pronunciation of a Kanji, whereas in China it depends on the region of the country you are in, as there is one written Chinese but several spoken Chinese languages. There are also "on" and "kun" readings, the "on" being based on Chinese, and "kun" in Japanese.



This is a copy of the living page "Kanji" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2003 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.