Direction of writing
Main article: Horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts
Traditionally, Japanese is written in a format called tategaki. In this format, the characters are written in columns going from top to bottom, with columns ordered from right to left. After reaching the bottom of each column, the reader continues at the top of the column to the left of the current one. This copies the column order of Chinese.
Modern Japanese also uses another writing format, called yokogaki. This writing format is horizontal and reads from left to right.
[edit]History of the Japanese script
[edit]Importation of kanji
The current Japanese writing system traces its history back to the 4th century CE, when Chinese characters (kanji) were introduced to Japan through Baekje[1]. No definitive evidence of any native Japanese writing system that predates the introduction of kanji exists. (A variety of supposedly ancient scripts, jindai moji (also kamiyo moji, 神代文字, lit. "writing of the gods' age") surfaced during the 1930s following the rise of Japanese nationalism–some pictographic, some runic in appearance, and some very close to hangul. Examples can be found on the Internet.[1])
Initially, Chinese characters were not used for writing Japanese; literacy meant fluency in Classical Chinese, not the vernacular. Eventually a system called kanbun (漢文) developed, which, along with kanji and something very similar to Chinese grammar, employed diacritics to hint at the Japanese translation. The earliest written history of Japan, the Kojiki (古事記), compiled sometime before 712, was written in kanbun. Even today Japanese high schools and some junior high schools teach kanbun as part of the curriculum.
[edit]The development of Man'yōgana
No full-fledged script for written Japanese existed until the development of man'yōgana (万葉仮名), which appropriated kanji for their phonetic value (derived from their Chinese readings) rather than their semantic value. Man'yōgana was initially used to record poetry, as in the Man'yōshū (万葉集), compiled sometime before 759, whence the writing system derives its name. The modern kana, namely hiragana and katakana, are simplifications and systemizations of man'yōgana.
Due to the large number of words and concepts entering Japan from China which had no native equivalent, many words entered Japanese directly, with a pronunciation similar to the original Chinese. This Chinese-derived reading is known as on-yomi (音読み), and this vocabulary as a whole is referred to as Sino-Japanese in English and kango 漢語 in Japanese. At the same time, native Japanese already had words corresponding to many borrowed kanji. Authors increasingly used kanji to represent these words. This Japanese-derived reading is known as kun-yomi (訓読み). A kanji may have none, one, or several on-yomi and kun-yomi. Okurigana are written after the initial kanji for verbs and adjectives to give inflection and to help disambiguate a particular kanji's reading. The same character may be read several different ways depending on the word. For example, the character 行 is read i as the first syllable of iku (行く) 'to go', okona as the first three syllables of okonau (行う, "to carry out"), gyō in the compound word gyōretsu (行列, "line" or "procession"), kō in the word ginkō (銀行, "bank"), and an in the word andon (行灯, "lantern").
Some Linguists have compared the Japanese borrowing of Chinese-derived vocabulary as akin to the influx of Romance vocabulary into English during the Norman conquest of England. Like English, Japanese has many synonyms of differing origin, with words from both Chinese and native Japanese. Sino-Japanese is often considered more formal or literary, just as latinate words in English often mark a higher register.
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