JAPANESE LANGUAGE AND WRITING

There are as many languages as there are people on earth, but the level of their usage is not the same. One group of languages is actively used by a large number of people, while another group is used by a small number of people. The main thing is that languages are an important means of human communication.

Japanese is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. According to scientific data, about 125,000,000 people speak this language in one country of the world. Its dictionary contains many words from the Chinese language. Japanese is a phonetic language. Its writing is mixed. Chinese characters – hieroglyphs – are used to represent words.

Hieroglyphic writing originates in China in the 5th century BC and Chinese characters were originally written on the bones. Hieroglyph means “holy letter” in Greek.

As recorded in ancient writings such as the Nihon Shoki and the Kojiki, a 5th-century sage named Wan was sent to Japan by the Chinese kingdom of Baekje to introduce hieroglyphs.

Each hieroglyph in the Japanese language has its own shape, sound, and meaning.

If you add a hieroglyph to another hieroglyph, its meaning changes. The initial meaning of the hieroglyphs can be traced from the elements they combine.

There are three types of writing in Japanese: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Each of them has its own uniqueness and rich creation history. The amazing thing is, the more hieroglyphs you know in Japanese, the more words you know that have (or don’t have) meaning on their own. In the Turkmen language, words are formed from the combination of letters. The same letter can appear in different word combinations if needed.

The first written form of the Japanese language was kanji (漢字). When Chinese characters were just being introduced into the Japanese language, the Japanese tried to pronounce them in Chinese. Kanji are Chinese characters that have been modified several times. They formed the modern script of the Japanese language. Kanji are written from top to bottom, left to right.

In the Japanese language, kanji hieroglyphs come in different forms depending on their usage. They include joyo kanji (常用漢字) and jinmeyou kanji (人名用漢字).

Joyo kanji consists of 2,136 characters and is the most common and officially accepted everyday form of writing used by the government. In order to be able to speak Japanese, it is necessary to master the joyo kanji, which consists of 2136 characters.

Jinmeou kanji consists of 2928 characters and is a group of kanji for writing human names.

2136 Joyo kanji and 983 jinmeou kanji are used to represent human names. In addition to joyo kanji and jinmeou kanji, hieroglyphs are also used. They are called hyougaiji (表外字). Jinmeou kanji and hyugaiji kanji are used in this language to be more fluent outside of joyo kanji.

Over time, the modern syllabic alphabet called kana (仮名) emerged to write Japanese literary words using Chinese characters. Writing in this alphabet is made up of syllabograms – combinations of stressed and unstressed sounds. Therefore, kana is a combination of hiragana and katakana, meaning that kana consists of hiragana and katakana hieroglyphs. The kana (syllable) alphabet forms the modern Japanese writing system after kanji.

As it turns out, unlike the Turkmen language, the Japanese language uses both the word alphabet (kanji) and the syllabic alphabet (kana, which is similar to hiragana and katakana). Each of these forms of writing has its own intended use.

Until the middle of the 19th century, the hiragana (ひらがな) form of the Japanese alphabet was considered the only alphabet available to women. Hiragana is mainly used for conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, adjectives, and complex kanji words.

Another form of Japanese writing is katakana (夫仮名). This type of writing of the Japanese language differs from the previous ones in terms of the number of letters-hieroglyphs in it and pronunciation. It mainly contains borrowed words, technical terms, names of animals and plants, dialects, television commercials, names of cafes and restaurants, names of foreign people.

Although Japanese hiragana and katakana are not written the same but they are pronounced the same.

Katakana is written more sharply than hiragana. The hiragana script is written in a circular and cursive style. For instance, katakana- カ、ヤ、キ、ア、コ、モ、ト. Hiragana-か、や、き、あ、こ、も、

In addition to the Chinese hieroglyphs, the Japanese also developed new ”kokuji” (国字) characters (also known as ”national characters”) to improve their writing and fully reflect their phonetic characteristics. For instance: 债―はなし、俣―また、微―たこ、杢―moku、榊―さかき、shizuku―しzuku、笹―ささ、鰯―いくし、椛―さしう.

Due to the significant grammatical differences between Japanese and Chinese, there are great difficulties in spelling Japanese using Chinese hieroglyphs. Accordingly, in order to eliminate this difficulty in writing, several orthographic reforms were carried out in Japan. The main goal of these reforms was to improve the quality of teaching hieroglyphs to children and make it easier. In order to make it easier for children to read, and to make fiction and magazines more understandable to the public, the number of hieroglyphs in the Japanese language has been reduced, and their writing has been simplified.

As it turns out, the alphabet of the Japanese language is significantly different from Turkmen language. In order to write different words in the language, it is necessary to use several alphabets – kanji and kana, and its variants – hiragana and katakana.

The alphabets of the Japanese language and their types can be visualized more clearly in the table 1.

Table 1

1. Coulmas F. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.
2. Griffiths M. When in Romaji… An Examination of Romanization. URL: http://www.tigercow.fateback.com/guide/articles/wir/wir01.html (Retrieved 10 Mar. 2003).
3. Hadamitzky W. Romanization systems. URL: http://www.hadamitzky.de/english/lp_romanization_sys.htm (Retrieved 01 May 2014).
4. Japanese Language. A rich blend of outside influence and internal innovation. URL: http://www.sg.emb-japan.go.jp/JapanAccess/language.htm  (Retrieved 25 Feb. 2003).

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