The Japanese Writing System

A Brief History

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Eventually a system called kanbun was developed, which used both Chinese characters (kanji) and something very similar to Chinese grammar, but often with diacritic marks placed alongside the Chinese text to give hints as to the Japanese equivalent. The earliest written history of Japan, the Kojiki, believed to have been compiled sometime before 712, was written in kanbun. Japanese schoolchildren are still taught introductory classes in kanbun.

There was still no system for rendering Japanese in written form until the development of manyogana, which used Chinese characters for their phonetic value (derived from their Chinese readings) rather than their semantic value. Manyogana was initially used to record poetry, as in the Manyoshu, which was compiled sometime before 759, and from which the writing system derives its name. Hiragana and katakana were both outgrowths from manyogana.

Due to the large number of words and concepts entering Japan from China which had no native equivalent, many kanji words entered Japanese directly, with a pronunciation similar to the original Chinese.

This Chinese-derived reading is known as on-yomi, and this vocabulary as whole is referred to as Sino-Japanese. At the same time, native Japanese already had words corresponding to many borrowed kanji. Authors increasingly used kanji to represent these words. This Japanese-derived reading is known as kun-yomi. A kanji may have zero, one or several of each of on-yomi and kun-yomi. In verbs and adjectives, okurigana can help disambiguate a particular kanji's reading.

Linguists have sometimes compared Japan's borrowing and adaptation of Chinese words into Japanese as similar to the effect that the Norman conquest of the British Isles had on the English language. Like English, Japanese has many synonyms of differing origin: words from both Chinese and native Japanese. In another similarity, words of Chinese origin often sound more formal or intellectual to a Japanese speaker, just as the latinate words in English often sound to an English speaker.

Western Influence

Western influences during the Meiji Era, and continued influences during the American occupation after World War II, also had important effects on the Japanese written language. One effect was on the use of foreign words (gairaigo) in Japanese, as well as the increased use of romaji. Another effect was to change the writing direction of Japanese.

Until the Meiji era, Japanese text was written top to bottom, right to left. The Meiji era saw the first use of horizontally written Japanese. Before World War II, this horizontal text was written from right to left, so as to be consistent with traditional Japanese writing. After the end of World War II, text started to be written from left to right, in the common western style. Both kinds of writing are still in use today. Occasionally, horizontal writing from right to left can still be seen, when the reader is likely to encounter the text in that direction (i.e. on the sides of vehicles, where text is often written from the front to the rear on both sides of the vehicle). This can sometimes cause a funny situation. "Kaba", a type of tree, was used as a name for a frigate in WWII but was spelled "Baka", "idiot" on the side of the ship.

Later reforms include changing the kana representation to accord with modern pronunciation.

Nuances of the Writing System >>

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