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Kanji
    Keywords: Culture & History

MikeNoGo: Kanji (漢字) 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 katakana?. Literally, kanji is Han (as in dynasty) characters.

While hiragana and katakana 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.

wms: My understanding based on a little bit of Japanese insturction is that kanji is not used as pictographs in Japanese, instead they are ideographs. That is, a character does not represent a word, it represents an idea; thus the ideograph for the concept of going somewhere would appear in both the the word "ikimashita" (sorry for the romaji, I don't know how to enter kanji or hiragana) which means "went" and "ikitai" (which means approximately "a desire to go"). To separate them, the ideograph would be combined with some hiragana to specify which of the words that come from the idea is being used.
kokiri: exactly. the link [ext] http://www.faqs.org/faqs/sci-lang-faq has a brief discussion about this, as well as the frequently held misconception that Eskimos have 17 (50, 100) words for snow. I think that there is a view now that any language that is going to be sophisticated enough to work for a modern (i.e. not prehistoric) society inevitably ends up being strongly phonetic. Both Egyptian and Mayan have in the past been held to be pictoral, only to be proven to be largely phonetic, in the case of Mayan, comparatively recently. There is an excellent book about the decoding of it, but it's name momentarily escapes me.

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.

Sebastian Not exactly. Just as some countries write a dash through the seven, there are variants. Compare Traditional Chinese and Japanese 漢 with simplified Chinese 汉.

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.

kokiri The japanese use of kanji comes in 2 forms. The first reading (kun) is a purely japanese one and is usually used for a single kanji on it's own. The second (on) is a japanese approximation of the chinese pronounciation of the character and is typically used in compounds. For example consider the first character in Shudan, 'hand talk':手談. This is being read as shu here and is the on reading of the character. The character's literal meaning is hand, and so when used on it's own it is read as 'te', the japanese for hand.

However this is complicated by the fact that one character may equate to more than one japanese 'kun' reading, say a noun and a couple of verbs. Also, there may be several 'on' chinese readings for the character. This equates roughly, as i understand it, to different chinese pronounciations of the character over the course of the centuries. Of course, the kanji were not imported lock stock and barrel in one period, rather, as sino-japanese relations have ebbed and flowed, they have been absorbed and reabsorbed in varying ways.

As for the characters themselves, I understand that in taiwan and Hong Kong an older more traditional (and complex) version of many charcters is used, Japan's are typically simpler, and the mainland Chinese modern versions are the most rationalised. In Japan, people's names often seem to use the more traditional versions of kanji, but the differences tend to be quite subtle.

Nejucomo?: Does anyone know where to find a page showing Kanji for common Go terms (in English)? I'd like to make a shirt that says "Kyu Player" in Kanji. Sebastian: I'm not sure if this term exists in Japanese. There exists the term "dan player": 有段者, which means "have dan -er". By analogy, you might use "有級者", but it is a bit tongue in cheek, because you can't really achieve kyu status.

[Diagram]
Yukyusha

You could express that the "kyu" is special by setting it off a differently colored go stone like this.

If you do this, may I ask you a favour? Could you order two more for me and a friend of mine (both size L)? Thanks! -- Sebastian

kokiri I think that the appropriate term would be kyu-i-sha, but I'm not really sure how to deal with kanji in SL so I can't append the appropriate 'i'...

...a little effort later: 級位者 but someone else might like to confirm this before you go printing any t-shirts - i'm a little rusty.

Velobici: [ext] PandaNet sells rating certificates based upon IGS performance. The example certificate has the following kanji for 3D: 五段格 (the number is an error. the kanji is 5.)

Sebastian: You mean, for filthy lucre, they embellish you with a certificate 2 levels above your actual grade? How scandalous! -- 2003-09-11



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