CultureNightHandoutJapaneseWriting.docVIP

Culture Night Handout: Japanese Writing How Systems of Writings are Formed. All systems of writing, when traced to their origins, are the result of people drawing pictures of various objects, such as with Egyptian hieroglyphics. For example, the first letter of the Semitic alphabet—aleph—means “ox” and was originally a drawing of this animal’s head, as many of their letters were derived from sketches see Figure 1 . The same meaning was retained when the Greeks adopted it into their alphabet as “alpha,” but in the end, the meaning was detached from the character, and only the vowel sound remains today in the English form of this character, the letter “a.” Amazingly, with a few minor exceptions, the order of the letters in the English alphabet follow the exact sequence as when the original characters were first transcribed in the Semitic alphabet, approximately 3,700 year ago! The Chinese, however, never used the phonetic elements of their characters to develop an alphabet. Needless to say, this presented some major challenges. For instance, to sketch every word in the Chinese vocabulary would require an overwhelming number of highly elaborate drawings. To solve this problem, the Chinese combined different drawings together to get related or derived meanings. By effectively recycling some of the drawings, they were able to reduce the total number pictures needed to transcribe their words. Additionally, they simplified the pictures and stylized them over time into the characters used today. These characters and combinations of characters make up the following six classifications of Kanji Chinese characters : Shōkei moji. Drawings of the object represented. 象形文字 Shiji moji. Drawings of abstract ideas such as numbers. 指事文字 Kai’i moji. Two or more drawings, each contributing to the meaning of the composite 会意文字 character. Keisei moji. One picture that expresses the character’s meaning combined with an added 形声文字 element that represents a pronunciation