James William Breen (born 1947) is a Research Fellow at Monash University in Australia, where he was a professor in the area of IT and telecommunications before his retirement in 2003. [1] He holds a BSc in mathematics, an MBA and a PhD in computational linguistics, all from the University of Melbourne. He is well known for his involvement in several popular free Japanese-related projects: the EDICT and JMDict Japanese–English dictionaries, the KANJIDIC kanji dictionary, and the WWWJDIC portal which provides an interface to search them. [1] [2] [3]
His EDICT dictionary and WWWJDIC server have been described as "reliable and close to comprehensive". [1] The 195,000-term lexicon is used by popular apps such as ImiWa (iOS) and AEDict (Android), and has been used to build other Japanese language learning sites such as Rikai and Jisho.org. [1]
He remains a board member of the Japanese Studies Centre at Monash University. [4]
Kanji are the logographic Chinese characters adapted from the Chinese script used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequently-derived syllabic scripts of hiragana and katakana. The characters have Japanese pronunciations; most have two, with one based on the Chinese sound. A few characters were invented in Japan by constructing character components derived from other Chinese characters. After the Meiji Restoration, Japan made its own efforts to simplify the characters, now known as shinjitai, by a process similar to China's simplification efforts, with the intention to increase literacy among the general public. Since the 1920s, the Japanese government has published character lists periodically to help direct the education of its citizenry through the myriad Chinese characters that exist. There are nearly 3,000 kanji used in Japanese names and in common communication.
Monash University is a public research university based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Named after World War I general Sir John Monash, it was founded in 1958 and is the second oldest university in the state. The university has a number of campuses, four of which are in Victoria, one in Malaysia and another one in Indonesia. Monash also has a research and teaching centre in Prato, Italy, a graduate research school in Mumbai, India and graduate schools in Suzhou, China and Tangerang, Indonesia. Courses are also delivered at other locations, including South Africa.
Japanese names in modern times consist of a family name (surname) followed by a given name. Japanese names are usually written in kanji, where the pronunciation follows a special set of rules. Because parents when naming children, and foreigners when adopting a Japanese name, are able to choose which pronunciations they want for certain kanji, the same written form of a name may have multiple readings. In exceptional cases, this makes it impossible to determine the intended pronunciation of a name with certainty. Even so, most pronunciations chosen for names are common, making them easier to read. While any jōyō kanji and jinmeiyō kanji may be used as part of a name, names may be rejected if they are believed to fall outside what would be considered an acceptable name by measures of common sense.
In the Japanese writing system, hentaigana are variant forms of hiragana.
Hanetsuki is a Japanese traditional game, similar to racket games like badminton but without a net, played with a rectangular wooden paddle called a hagoita and a brightly coloured shuttlecock, called a hane. Often played by girls at the New Year, the game can be played by any gender in two fashions: by one person attempting to keep the shuttlecock aloft as long as possible, or by two people batting it back and forth. Players who fail to hit the shuttlecock get marked on the face with India Ink. Traditionally, the longer the shuttlecock remains in the air, the greater protection from mosquitoes the players will receive during the coming year. Although hanetsuki is not as popular as it used to be, decorative hagoita are commonly sold throughout Japan.
Unsui, or kōun ryūsui (行雲流水) in full, is a term specific to Zen Buddhism which denotes a postulant awaiting acceptance into a monastery or a novice monk who has undertaken Zen training. Sometimes they will travel from monastery to monastery (angya) on a pilgrimage to find the appropriate Zen master with which to study.
Tokuhime, also known as Lady Toku and Okazaki-dono was a Japanese noble lady from the Sengoku period. She was the eldest daughter of daimyō Oda Nobunaga and his concubine, Lady Kitsuno. She later married Matsudaira Nobuyasu, the first son of Tokugawa Ieyasu. She is remembered as the person most responsible for the deaths of Nobuyasu and his mother, Ieyasu's wife, Lady Tsukiyama.
The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten (日本国語大辞典), also known as the Nikkoku (日国) and in English as Shogakukan's Unabridged Dictionary of the Japanese Language, is the largest Japanese language dictionary published.
Japanese dictionaries have a history that began over 1300 years ago when Japanese Buddhist priests, who wanted to understand Chinese sutras, adapted Chinese character dictionaries. Present-day Japanese lexicographers are exploring computerized editing and electronic dictionaries. According to Nakao Keisuke (中尾啓介):
It has often been said that dictionary publishing in Japan is active and prosperous, that Japanese people are well provided for with reference tools, and that lexicography here, in practice as well as in research, has produced a number of valuable reference books together with voluminous academic studies. (1998:35)
WWWJDIC is an online Japanese dictionary based on the electronic dictionaries compiled and collected by Australian academic Jim Breen. The main Japanese–English dictionary file (EDICT) contains over 180,000 entries, and the ENAMDICT dictionary contains over 720,000 Japanese surnames, first names, place names and product names. WWWJDIC also contains several specialized dictionaries covering topics such as life sciences, law, computing, engineering, etc.
Doi (土井、土居、土肥) are three Japanese family names that are pronounced identically, with the first kanji of each pair of characters meaning "earth." Since they are the same phonetically, they are romanized identically: "do" for the first character and "i" for the second. Their identical pronunciation makes them function as the same surname in languages with writing systems that do not use some form of Chinese characters.
JWPce is a simple Japanese-language text editor that runs on the Windows 95, ME, 2000, XP, NT, and CE platforms. It is designed for non-native speakers of Japanese who want to produce Japanese-language documents. Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, JWPce is free software.
JIS X 0212 is a Japanese Industrial Standard defining a coded character set for encoding supplementary characters for use in Japanese. This standard is intended to supplement JIS X 0208. It is numbered 953 or 5049 as an IBM code page.
Mitsue, also spelled Mitsuye in older transcriptions, is a Japanese given name and toponym. Its meaning differs depending on the kanji used to write it.
Shigenobu is a Japanese name. It is usually a male given name but can be a surname or the name of a place. As with most personal names, the meaning of the name is derived from which kanji are used, and there are several different kanji that are pronounced "shige" and a few which can be pronounced "nobu."
Mizui is a Japanese surname and toponym. Its meaning differs depending on the kanji used to write it.
JMdict is a large machine-readable multilingual Japanese dictionary. As of March 2023, it contains Japanese–English translations for around 199,000 entries, representing 282,000 unique headword-reading combinations. The dictionary files are free to use with attribution and have been widely adopted on the Internet and are used in many computer and smartphone applications. The project is considered a standard Japanese–English reference on the Internet and is used by the Unihan Database and several other Japanese–English projects.
Akiho is a Japanese given name and surname. According to WWWJDIC, there are more than a hundred different ways this name might be written in kanji.
The CJK Dictionary Institute, Inc. (CJKI) is a Japan-based dictionary compilation company headed by Jack Halpern. It specializes in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic lexicography, as well as the compilation and maintenance of large-scale lexical databases.
Gavan Breen, also known as J. G. Breen, was an Australian linguist, specialising in the description of Australian Aboriginal languages. He studied and recorded 49 such languages.