No-sword’s post on this is already brief, so I won’t shorten it here other than to note that sentences like “The furigana undermine the kanji at the most fundamental level, but the overall meaning of the poster remains unchanged” are the sort of thing that really make my day.
Just go read the whole post, which discusses something at the intriguingly titled Moji no ura-d?ri (which Matt translates freely as “The Back Streets of Orthography”).
Matt of No-sword has two recent posts (<gue> to fabulas and I just can’t stop talking about old Portugo-Japanese texts online) on translations into Japanese of several books related to Aesop. These books are from the late sixteenth century and are the work of Portuguese Jesuits. And they’re in R?maji.
Here’s a link to the fable of the horse and the ass. For more links, see Matt’s posts.
Matt at No-sword talks about the uses of the letter W in Japan:
Many English initialisms are used in Japan, like CM for “commercial [movie]”, but W is a special letter: it can represent meaning all by itself. This is because it is generally pronounced “double” instead of “double-u”, so it’s handy for referring to things that are doubled.
Read the whole piece: Let the pretending to be injured begin.
Stockholm University’s Department of Oriental Languages has just released Long Story of Short Forms: The Evolution of Simplified Chinese Characters (10.4 MB PDF), a Ph.D. dissertation by Roar Bökset.
Here is the abstract:
A script reform was carried out in China between 1955 and 1964 by simplifying the shape of a number of characters. Most of the simplified forms adopted had already been in popular use for a long time before this reform, while a few were invented for the occasion.
One objective of this dissertation is to estimate the proportion of invented forms. To this end, use of simplified variants before 1955 was surveyed. Pre-reform writing turned out to be more heterogeneous than expected. In fact, already Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) handwriting differed considerably from the norms set up by contemporary dictionaries and model texts.
One aim of the script reform was to unify writing habits and make them conform better with established norms. To evaluate the Script Reform Committee’s success in this field, this dissertation surveys the use of different unofficial short forms even after the reform. Success turned out to be moderate. Many pre-1955 short variants survived, and, what was worse, new ones emerged after the reform. Particularly confusing was the use of different unofficial short forms in different parts of China. The existence of such local variants was confirmed by extensive reading of signs, advertisements, price tags and wall newspapers in twenty-one provinces, and by interviews with informants at four hundred localities. Results of that survey are displayed on twenty-four maps.
A few years earlier, even Japanese characters had gone through a reform which made many simplified forms official. Some of the new official Japanese forms differed from those which came to be official in China, creating a discrepancy which has at times been lamented. However, this dissertation compares the short forms used in pre-reform Japan with those of pre-reform China, and shows that most of the present discrepancies have roots in differences in Chinese and Japanese writing traditions, which bound the hands of reformers in both countries and enforced the decisions which were eventually made.
Aborigines from Kangke (寒溪) Village, who are a branch of northern Taiwan’s Atayal tribe, protested last week against the Council of Indigenous People’s tribal language examination policy, requesting that the Kangke dialect be included.
The Kangke dialect has long been different from other Atayal languages because it was influenced by the Japanese language during the period of Japanese occupation.
The council plans to begin tribal language examinations next year, yet the Kangke dialect is not listed as one of the official dialects of the Atayal tribe, said Fang Hsi-en (方喜恩), an indigenous rights activist. In the examination policy, the Kangke dialect is incorporated into the Squliq and the C’uli’ dialects.
Fang said that to pass the tribal language exams, students in Kangke Village must now study either the Squliq or the C’uli’ dialects using a romanized spelling system because the Kangke dialect is nothing like them.
The scores on the language exam (which has no writing, by the way) can have a real effect on people’s lives. Under an affirmative action program set up by the Ministry of Education, members of Taiwan’s tribes are entitled to have their high school and college entrance exam scores raised by 25 percent. Under a policy expected to be made effective next year, those who pass a tribal language exam would have an additional 10 percent added to their scores.
Fang said that the system was unfair for Kangke students because the council did not classify their dialect as an official one. He said the tribal language examination should not be linked with entrance exams scores in any way.
Lee Su-min (李淑敏), the head of the Parent-Teacher Association at Kangke Elementary School, said that such a classification also stunted the preservation of the dialect and the Kangke culture….
In response to the protests, Wang Chiui (汪秋一), the director of the Department of Education and Culture at the council, said that the tribal language examination policy is still being discussed with the education ministry.
But the goal of the language examination was to promote tribal language education, Wang said.
Wang reminded the protestors that the language exam was in fact oral and that he would request that the council include the Kangke dialect in the exam.
If included, a representative from the village will also be invited to be an oral examiner, he said.
I wish someone had asked some of the linguists at Academia Sinica about this. Just how different is Kangke from what is currently officially recognized as Atayal? What’s the extent of the influence of Japanese on the language? Is it just a matter of some loan words? How many?
sources:
Newspapers and magazines have so much misinformation about Chinese characters that I seldom bother to mention specific instances. But I expect better than this from the New York Times, even though this is but soft news:
The two designers chose 20 stellar examples of a concept defined by the Japanese ideogram katei. It is the joining of two symbols — ka being house and tei being garden — that defines home in Japanese.
Oy. First, katei is not written with one “ideogram” [sic] but two Chinese characters / kanji:
(Somebody help me out if I got that wrong. I don’t know Japanese.) In Mandarin this is jiātíng, meaning “family.” Nishikawa Yūko has a long discussion about notions of katei in “The Modern Japanese Family System: unique or universal?” (Multicultural Japan. Palaeolithic to Postmodern. Donald Denoon, Mark Hudson, Gavan McCormack, and Tessa Morris-Suzuki, eds. Cambridge University Press, pp. 224-232).
Second, Chinese characters / kanji do not represent an ideographic form of writing.
Third, the Japanese language is not defined by symbols. Language comes first, writing later.
Fourth, calling Chinese characters “symbols” is at best problematic; this is part of what feeds the ideographic myth. (See the second point.)
I’m all for good design, but it shouldn’t be explained in terms of myths. Otherwise, perhaps architects and interior designers should be putting functioning pigpens inside houses, or at least a little covered shrine to a pig. After all, if we’re going to be guided by how characters look, is not the very essence of “home” (家) in Japan and China defined by having a pig (豕) under a roof (宀)?
source: Homes and Gardens, Living in Harmony, New York Times, March 9, 2006
No-sword links to an interesting page titled Unicode in Japan: Guide to a technical and psychological struggle. There’s a lot of useful information in this.
The Web page also touches some on script reform in postwar Japan; for the full story, see Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan: Reading Between the Lines, by J. Marshall Unger. Pinyin Info offers a chapter-long selection from this book.
Other pages on that site include a Unicode tutorial, which is billed as “a page of Unicode terms, FAQs, and mistakes.”
My pet peeve about Unicode is its continuing, incorrect reference to Chinese characters as “ideographs.”
Signs leading to a temple in Japan’s Nara Prefecture feature a variety of romanizations. Inconsistent romanization is hardly newsworthy in itself, this being common in East Asia. But things get a little more interesting as the article progresses.
Akihiko Yonekawa, a Japanese language professor at Baika Women’s University, says that “Muroji” is not a proper phonetic spelling, so if that is the goal it should be spelled “Murooji.” According to the direct transcription of kana characters, it would be “Murouji,” but that does not comply with Hepburn’s principles. The professor notes that prohibiting macrons made the whole process more difficult.
West Japan Railway Co. agrees. Forgoing the Hepburn system, the railway firm uses macrons for names with long vowel sounds, like Kyoto.
Macrons were used in romanization for decades after World War II, but in 1986 the transport ministry prohibited them.
“We don’t know the details as to the change,” says a transport ministry official.
“But we presume that Roman characters with macrons were not used for many of the road signs in the past, and those officials in charge of the changes might have thought it would be difficult for foreigners to understand the Roman alphabet with added macrons, since there are no macrons in English.”
As far as Yonekawa is concerned, the problem comes down to indifference. “Japanese people stick to how kanji are used appropriately, but they show little interest in other types of characters,” he says with a sigh.
Difficult for foreigners to understand the Roman alphabet with added macrons? Perhaps what the official means is that without macrons even the most ignorant foreigners can imagine that they know how to pronounce Japanese correctly. But with them they might have cause to doubt. Is that really such a bad thing?
source: Long vowels spell confusion for temple, International Herald Tribune & Asahi Shimbum, March 7,2006