The Japanese alphabet and its characteristics

The Japanese language is currently spoken by more than one hundred and twenty million people in the world, being the ninth most spoken worldwide. Due to its weight in the world economy and its current influence on culture, especially youth culture, it is important to know about the Japanese alphabet.

JAPANESE ALPHABET

Japanese alphabet

The Japanese script is derived from the Chinese script that came to Japan through Korea around the XNUMXth century. There are three main writing systems in modern Japanese: Kanji, which are characters of Chinese origin, and two syllabic alphabets created in Japan: hiragana, syllabary for words of Japanese origin and katakana, a syllabary used mainly for words of foreign origin and the Romaji, representation of Japanese with the Latin alphabet.

Latin letters are commonly used in Japanese texts, used to write common abbreviations (such as DVD or NATO) and other purposes. The transliteration of the Japanese language into Latin letters is called Romaji and is rarely found in Japanese texts.

For writing numbers, Arabic numerals are often used. The exclusion of any of the listed script types or the replacement of one by another in its accepted usage makes the text difficult to read or incomprehensible at all - this, perhaps, does not apply to Latin letters, whose role and usage is currently much less compared to the three main systems.

Kanji

Kanji are Chinese characters used in Japanese writing mainly to write Japanese nouns, verbs and adjectives and proper nouns. The earliest Chinese texts were brought to Japan by Buddhist monks from the Korean kingdom of Baekje in the XNUMXth century AD. C. Today, along with the original Chinese characters, signs created in Japan are used: the so-called kokuji.

Depending on how you find the kanji in a Japanese sentence, hieroglyphs can be used to write one or different words or, more often, morphemes. From the reader's point of view, this means that the kanji have one or more interpretations. The choice of the meaning of a kanji depends on the context, the combination with other kanji, the place in a sentence, etc. Some kanji in common use have ten or more different readings.

JAPANESE ALPHABET

hiragana

Hiragana is one of the syllabaries used in the Japanese language. Hiragana results from the simplification of the more complex Chinese characters that arrived before the beginning of Japanese cultural isolation. One of the main characteristics of hiragana is its curved and simple strokes; Initially it was given the name of onnade which means "woman's hand", because it was created by the women there to be a more beautiful version of the straight forms of katakana.

Hiragana can convey vowel sounds, combinations of syllables, and a consonant. It is used for words that do not contain kanji, such as particles and suffixes. Hiragana is used with words instead of kanji in cases where the reader is not supposed to know some hieroglyphs, or these hieroglyphs are unfamiliar to the writer, as well as in unofficial correspondence. The forms of verbs and adjectives are also written in hiragana. Also, hiragana is used to write phonetic clues to read kanji – furigana.

At first, hiragana was used only by women who did not have access to a good education. Another name for hiragana is "female letter." The Tale of Genji (Monogatari Genji), a Japanese classic, and other ancient women's novels were initially or exclusively written in hiragana. Today, texts written only by hiragana are found in books for preschool children. To make reading easier, such books have spaces between words.

The Japanese hiragana alphabet contains forty-six characters in total, of which forty represent syllables made up of a consonant and a vowel, five are vowels (a, i, u, e, o); and the only consonant that can go alone, the "n" (ene).

The hiragana is used in the writing of words of Japanese origin, particles and verbal endings; unlike katakana which is used for foreign words and onomatopoeia. Therefore, hiragana is the first Japanese alphabet learned by Japanese children. As they learn the kanji, students replace syllabic characters in favor of Chinese characters.

Katakana

Katakana is one of the two syllabaries used in Japanese writing, along with hiragana. It was created by the Buddhist monk Kūkai, or Kobo Daishi. In the same way, katakana is said to any character used in this Japanese alphabet. When the two syllabaries are used together, hiragana and katakana are called kana. Katakana is newer than hiragana.

JAPANESE ALPHABET

Katakana characters have no meaning, their use is exclusively phonetic. Katakana is a Japanese alphabet that contains forty-six characters that represent syllables composed of a consonant and a vowel, or a single vowel. Of the consonants, only the "n" (ene) can go alone.

Katakana allows sound to be transmitted in the same way as hiragana. It is used to write words taken from languages ​​that do not use Chinese characters: foreign words, foreign names, as well as onomatopoeia and scientific and technical terms: plant names, machine parts, etc.

Katakana is used to write words that come from foreign languages, currently the most widely used language is English, it is also used to write onomatopoeia. It is used to highlight a specific word, in the same way as in Western writing quotation marks or italics are used. It is used in scientific texts to write the name of animals, plants, etc. In other types of texts they are written in kanji or hiragana.

Actually the two syllabaries, both hiragana and katakana are equivalent, although the uses of each one are different. As in the Latin alphabet, there is something similar in the use of uppercase and lowercase letters, in the sense that the spellings and uses differ but are equivalent.

Rmaji

The rōmaji refers roughly to the Latin alphabet. In general, this term is used in the West to indicate the writing of the Japanese language in Roman or Latin letters, as opposed to the normal mix of kanji, hiragana, and katakana.

Rōmaji is generally used on signs and banners for foreigners visiting Japan; transcription of names of persons, companies or places to be employed in another language or country; dictionaries or textbooks for students of the Japanese language; the vast majority of companies in Japan have their name written in rōmaji; just like katakana to make a word stand out.

In Japan in different manufacturing equipment (cars, televisions, etc.). Its use is very extended when placing the name of the factory and its models, in rōmaji; in both incoming and outgoing international mail, and in internal mail it can also be used.

There are several systems of Japanese romanization. The first Japanese romanization system was based on the Portuguese language and its alphabet, and was developed around 1548 by Japanese Catholics. After the expulsion of the Christians from Japan in the early XNUMXth century, rōmaji fell into disuse and was used only occasionally until the Meiji Restoration in the mid-XNUMXth century, when Japan again opened up for international contacts. All current systems were developed in the second half of the XNUMXth century.

The most common Hepburn system is based on the phonology of the English language and gives English speakers the best understanding of how a word is pronounced in Japanese. Another system is recognized as the state standard in Japan: Kunrei shiki, which more accurately conveys the grammatical structure of the Japanese language.

The Kunrei shiki, also known as monbushō, is a romanization system for transliterating the Japanese language into the Roman alphabet. It is the system preferred by the Monbushō (Japanese Ministry of Education), although it is used above all in Japan, the Hepburn romanization being much more widespread, especially among Hispanic speakers.

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