On Mon, 31 Jan 2005 11:00:45 -0600, Joseph J. Strout
<joe at realsoftware dot com> wrote:
> You must be differing with the description of kanji as "Chinese
> characters" -- but this is indeed how they are referred to and
> described in Japanese. This is compared to romaji, which are
> standard Roman characters, and hiragana or katakana, which are
> (each) a phonetic alphabet. I think the reference to kanji as
> Chinese characters has more to do with their origin than with their
> similarity today.
And, in fact, "kanji" means "Chinese character". The characters in use
today in Japan came from China. But they came from China about 1500
years ago. Since that time, characters have changed in China, and
sometimes a lot. Also, there are characters in Chinese that never made
it to Japan. The characters haven't really changed that much in Japan,
however, so the characters you see in Japanese are a lot closer, in
many ways, to the old Chinese characters. Also Hiragana and Katakana,
the two syllabic writing systems, themselves come from Chinese
characters.
Way off topic, of course :)
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