Modern Japanese characters and their meaning in Russian do not differ much from their ancient predecessors. This article will talk about the features of Japanese characters and briefly about the history of the development of this phenomenon.
Historical facts about Japanese characters
For writing in Japanese, special characters are used - hieroglyphs, which were borrowed from China. In the Land of the Rising Sun, this is how the hieroglyphs are called: "Signs of the Han Dynasty", or "Chinese letters" 漢字 (kanji). It is believed that the system of Chinese symbols and signs appeared in the sixteenth century BC. Japan until the fifth century AD. e. did not have a written language. This was due to the absence of a central authority. Japan was a weakened country, which consisted of a large number of principalities, each of which had its own ruler, its own dialect. But gradually strong rulers came to the leadership, who began to unite the small Japanese principalities, which led to the borrowing of cultural aspects and the writing system of the most powerful country at that time - the Middle Kingdom. It is not known for certain how writing from China came to Japan, but there is a widespread theory that the firsthieroglyphs were brought into the country by Buddhist priests. The introduction of the Chinese system was difficult, because the Japanese language has little in common with its Chinese brother in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. Initially, kanji and Chinese characters were identical, but now significant differences have appeared between them: some characters were invented in Japan itself - “national pictograms” 国 字 (kokuji), some have acquired a different meaning of the character. Gradually, the writing of many kanji was simplified.
Why hieroglyphs have several reading options
Japanese borrowed from Chinese not only symbols, but also their reading. The Japanese tried to pronounce any Chinese character in their own way. This is how the “Chinese” or “on” reading appeared - 音読 (onemi). For example, the Chinese word for water (水) is “shui”, taking into account the specifics of Japanese phonetics, it began to sound like “sui”. Some of the kanji have several onemi, because they were brought from China more than once in different eras and from different regions. But when the Japanese wanted to use characters to write their own lexemes, Chinese readings were no longer enough. Therefore, there was a need to translate hieroglyphs into Japanese. Just as the English word "water" is translated as "みず, mizu", the Chinese word "水" was given the same meaning of the character - "みず". This is how the "Japanized", "kun" reading of the hieroglyph appeared - 訓読み (kunemi). A part of a kanji may have several kuns at once, or it may not have at all. Frequently usedpictograms can have up to 10 different readings. The reading of a hieroglyph depends on many factors: context, basic meaning, combination with other characters, and even position in a sentence. Therefore, quite often the only correct method to identify where reading is one-on-one and where reading is kun is to memorize specific examples.
How many characters are there in Japanese
Getting an answer to the question about the exact number of pictograms is almost impossible, since their number is truly huge. The dictionaries contain them from 40 to 80 thousand. But in the field of programming, fonts have been published that contain encodings of 160,000 characters or more. They included all the ancient and modern hieroglyphs ever used throughout the world. Understanding the meaning of a hieroglyph is always laborious work. In everyday texts, for example, newspapers or magazines, only a small part of hieroglyphs is used - about two thousand five hundred characters. Of course, there are also rare hieroglyphs, mainly technological and medical concepts, rare names and surnames. At the moment, there is a list of "characters for everyday use" ("joe-kanji"), which is approved by the government and contains two thousand characters. It is this number of characters that a student of the Japanese school system should know and be able to write. Hieroglyphs in Japanese and their meaning in Russian are contained in major academic dictionaries.
Why do Japanese people consider characters to be a national feature
Many people who study Japanese or Chinese often ask whyis the uncomfortable and complicated writing system still in use? Hieroglyphs are ideographic symbols, in the writing of which at least a symbolic, but similarity with the depicted object has been preserved. For example, the first Chinese pictograms are images of specific objects: 木 - "plant", 火 - "flame". Japanese characters and their meaning in Russian have several interpretations.
The relevance of the hieroglyphic writing system today is partly due to the fact that this type of writing has some advantages over other types. With the help of the same signs, people speaking different dialects can speak, because the ideogram conveys the meaning, and not the sound of the word. For example, after reading the character "犬", Koreans, Chinese and Japanese will read the sign in different ways, but they all understand that it is about a dog. Obviously, each meaning of the character depends on the context.
The Japanese will not abandon their writing system
Another advantage of the system is the compactness of the notation, a whole word is written with one character. Will the inhabitants of Japan refuse hieroglyphs in the foreseeable future? No, they won't refuse. Indeed, due to the huge number of homonyms in Japanese, the use of these ancient symbols has become simply necessary. With the same pronunciation, words, depending on their meaning, are written with different pictograms. The importance of characters in Japanese culture cannot be underestimated.
