Furigana is a Japanese reading aid consisting of smaller kana printed either above or next to kanji or other characters to indicate their pronunciation. It is one type of ruby text. Furigana is also known as yomigana (読み仮名) and rubi in Japanese. In modern Japanese, it is usually used to gloss rare kanji, to clarify rare, nonstandard or ambiguous kanji readings, or in children's or learners' materials. Before the post-World War II script reforms, it was more widespread.
Hiragana is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana as well as kanji.
Katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script.
Kana are syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. In current usage, kana most commonly refers to hiragana and katakana. It can also refer to their ancestor magana, which were Chinese characters used phonetically to transcribe Japanese ; and hentaigana, which are historical variants of the now-standard hiragana.
In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or moras which make up words.
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 common folk. 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.
Man'yōgana is an ancient writing system that uses Chinese characters to represent the Japanese language. It was the first known kana system to be developed as a means to represent the Japanese language phonetically. The date of the earliest usage of this type of kana is not clear, but it was in use since at least the mid-7th century. The name "man'yōgana" derives from the Man'yōshū, a Japanese poetry anthology from the Nara period written with man'yōgana.
In the Japanese writing system, hentaigana are variant forms of hiragana.
James Wallace Heisig is a philosopher who specialises in the field of philosophy of religion. He has published a number of books on topics ranging from the notion of God in analytical psychology, the Kyoto School of Philosophy to contemporary inter-religious dialogue. His books, translations, and edited collections, which have appeared in 18 languages, currently number 90 volumes.
Okurigana are kana suffixes following kanji stems in Japanese written words. They serve two purposes: to inflect adjectives and verbs, and to force a particular kanji to have a specific meaning and be read a certain way. For example, the plain verb form 見る inflects to past tense 見た, where 見 is the kanji stem, and る and た are okurigana, written in hiragana script. With very few exceptions, okurigana are only used for kun'yomi, not for on'yomi, as Chinese morphemes do not inflect in Japanese, and their pronunciation is inferred from context, since many are used as parts of compound words (kango).
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is considered to be one of the most complicated currently in use.
Gyaru-moji or heta-moji is a style of obfuscated (cant) Japanese writing popular amongst urban Japanese youth. As the name gyaru-moji suggests, this writing system was created by and remains primarily employed by young women.
In modern Japanese, ateji principally refers to kanji used to phonetically represent native or borrowed words with less regard to the underlying meaning of the characters. This is similar to man'yōgana in Old Japanese. Conversely, ateji also refers to kanji used semantically without regard to the readings.
A is a Japanese kana that represents the mora consisting of single vowel. The hiragana character あ is based on the sōsho style of kanji 安, while the katakana ア is from the radical of kanji 阿. In the modern Japanese system of alphabetical order, it occupies the first position of the alphabet, before い. Additionally, it is the 36th letter in Iroha, after て, before さ. The Unicode for あ is U+3042, and the Unicode for ア is U+30A2.
Shinjitai are the simplified forms of kanji used in Japan since the promulgation of the Tōyō Kanji List in 1946. Some of the new forms found in shinjitai are also found in simplified Chinese characters, but shinjitai is generally not as extensive in the scope of its modification.
In Japanese language, Ryakuji are colloquial simplifications of kanji.
Wi is an obsolete Japanese kana, which is normally pronounced in current-day Japanese. The combination of a W-column kana letter with ゐ゙ in hiragana was introduced to represent in the 19th century and 20th century. It is presumed that 'ゐ' represented, and that 'ゐ' and 'い' represented distinct pronunciations before merging to sometime between the Kamakura and Taishō periods. Along with the kana for we, this kana was deemed obsolete in Japanese with the orthographic reforms of 1946, to be replaced by 'い/イ' in all contexts. It is now rare in everyday usage; in onomatopoeia and foreign words, the katakana form 'ウィ' (U-[small-i]) is used for the mora.
Hyōgaiji, also known as hyōgai kanji (表外漢字), is a term for Japanese kanji outside the two major lists of jōyō kanji, which are taught in primary and secondary school, and the jinmeiyō kanji, which are additional kanji that are officially allowed for use in personal names. The term jōyōgai kanji (常用外漢字) is also encountered, but it designates all the kanji outside the list of jōyō kanji, including the jinmeiyō kanji.
The Japanese script reform is the attempt to correlate standard spoken Japanese with the written word, which began during the Meiji period. This issue is known in Japan as the kokugo kokuji mondai. The reforms led to the development of the modern Japanese written language, and explain the arguments for official policies used to determine the usage and teaching of kanji rarely used in Japan.
The Chinese family of scripts includes writing systems used to write various East Asian languages, that ultimately descend from the oracle bone script invented in the Yellow River valley during the Shang dynasty. These include written Chinese itself, as well as adaptations of it for other languages, such as Japanese kanji, Korean hanja, Vietnamese chữ Hán and chữ Nôm, Zhuang sawndip, and Bai bowen. More divergent are the Tangut script, Khitan large script, Khitan small script and its offspring, the Jurchen script, as well as the Yi script, Sui script, and Geba syllabary, which were inspired by written Chinese but not descended directly from it. While written Chinese and many of its descendant scripts are logographic, others are phonetic, including the kana, Nüshu, and Lisu syllabaries, as well as the bopomofo semi-syllabary.
