The Japanese language can be divided into three types of writing - hiragana, katakana and kanji. Kanji is the type which looks similar to Chinese because it was taken from the Chinese language. The Japanese essentially borrowed the Chinese system of writing way back under Prince Shotoku (I think). The same time when the Buddhist scholars brought […]
Written on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 by genarobest :: 0 comments to this post
The Japanese language can be divided into three types of writing - hiragana, katakana and kanji.
Kanji is the type which looks similar to Chinese because it was taken from the Chinese language.
The Japanese essentially borrowed the Chinese system of writing way back under Prince Shotoku (I think). The same time when the Buddhist scholars brought tea over from China.
In the past, the entire Japanese writing system was made up of Chinese characters but later on they decided to adapt some characters into simpler forms for everyday usage, which resulted in the formation of hiragana.
Katakana on the other hand is used to ‘write’ foreign words borrowed from other languages, especially English, by the Japanese. For example, ‘toilet’ in English is written by the Japanese in Katakana as ‘toire’. The pronounciation is kept in that way. This is because some English words don’t have direct Japanese translations, especially if it is the name of a Western invention.
I’m not sure about the Koreans but their language is very close to the Japanese language in terms of the pronounciation of certain words. I did a module in Japanese studies so this is as much as I know.
The Vietnamese on the other hand, are closely related to the Chinese due to long periods of Chinese domination and influence and due to the fact that they originated from the area which now comprises of Northern Vietnam and Southern China.
Hope this helps! Try Wikipedia. Its generally informative.
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