Thanks to late 70s/early 80s anime, I grew up kind of obsessed with Japan. For example, I have long known that a “daimyo” was a feudal ruler back in the era of the shoguns. But I had only ever seen it written in English. In Japan, I saw this:
大名
It says “big name”. And I can read that. Because those are Chinese characters. Let me explain.
Long ago, Japan had a spoken language but no written language. The Chinese, however, had already devised a written language. The Japanese adopted these Chinese symbols as written representations of their preexisting Japanese words. The Japanese call these imported Chinese characters “kanji“.
We probably ought to revise my Chinese language matrix to include kanji as one of the places still using traditional characters. And somewhat old (though not ancient) traditional characters at that.
That’s all well and good for words like “mountain” or concepts like “Zen” but there were a whole host of things that Chinese written characters just couldn’t cover. For this, the Japanese took bits and pieces of the kanji and devised syllabaries. (A syllabary is like an alphabet, but for full syllables.) These are called the “kana” and the Japanese traditionally attribute their invention to a Buddhist priest named Kūkai. There are two kinds of modern kana: hiragana and katakana.
Hiragana is largely used to “spell out” Japanese words which have no kanji. (Or to aid pronunciation of kanji which may be unfamiliar.)
Katakana is usually used for foreign words (like “America” or “television”) or for emphasis (think of Stan Lee onomatopoeia like “kapow!” or “thwack!”)
Rounding out the kana are two diacritical marks: the dakuten (゛) marker (to indicate a voiced instead of unvoiced consonant) and the handakuten (゜) marker (to indicate that “h” should be the “p” plosive.)
Whew. I love this stuff and even I’m exhausted.
TL;DR Japan has a written language.
Interesting. When I took Japanese language classes in college, from native Japanese teachers, they definitely didn’t tell it that way. In their telling, the kana alphabets existed before the Japanese were exposed to Chinese language and writing. Though nobody disputes that for a long time there being literate in Chinese was the only thing that passed for literacy at all in Japan. That’s why the first surviving Japanese novel was written by a woman, in kana, because can you imagine writing a novel in a language you barely understood? :)
Man, I would make the worst journalist. Amended, Holly. Thanks!
Sorry, I should have not said novel. The Pillow Book wasn’t a novel, more like a diary, but it is the oldest Japanese book to have survived to modern times.
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