Tag Archives: linguistics

Japanese writing system(s)

I get asked about the Japanese writing system a lot: “How do many symbols are there?” “It’s like Chinese except easier, right?” It’s actually pretty complicated, but here’s the crash course.

There are three systems in simultaneous use today, called hiragana, katakana, and kanji. They are each used for different purposes, and look differently too. Compare the upper-case and lower-case alphabets of English: we use both in nearly every sentence.

History lesson

The best way to explain their purposes and features is through history. Way back when, the Japanese had no way to write their language. One day, a ship came over from the Asian mainland, and it brought (among other things) Buddhist documents written in Chinese.

There are two things you should know at this point. First, Chinese and Japanese are completely unrelated languages. Their grammars have little in common, and there is no overlap (at least at this point in time) in their vocabularies. Second, Chinese writing is only ideographs – where each character represents an idea. A familiar analogy is Arabic numerals in English: the character “1” has a particular meaning associated with it, rather than a pronunciation. Derivatives of it, like “1st” and “13” sound nothing like “one”, but all share a meaning related to one-ness. Because there are a huge number of ideas out there – many more than there are sounds in a language – there are countless characters.

Okay, back to the story. The Japanese learned how to read and write Chinese, and actually spoke Chinese in their courts. Compare this to the Czar’s family, who spoke French with one another. At first, the nobility carried on with this two-language lifestyle, a phenomenon known as diglossia.

Eventually, though, this became too cumbersome. Some of the women in the court came up with shorthand derived from these characters. Some created a code of syllables based off of certain pieces of characters. For example, they created the letter ヤ ya from the Chinese character 也 (which is pronounced ya), and ク ku from 久 ku. This is the origin of the katakana syllabary. And other court ladies did something slightly different: they created a code of syllables from the cursive forms of Chinese characters. Some examples include ほ ho from the character 保 ho, and わwa from the character 和 wa. This is called the hiragana syllabary.

Another transformation that took place is the application of Chinese characters to Japanese native words. So, if you’ll recall, Chinese and Japanese didn’t have related vocabularies. So the Japanese took all the Chinese characters for all the different concepts, and mapped their own words onto the appropriate characters. Here’s an example. The native Japanese word for water is mizu while in Chinese it is shuǐ.  The Chinese write water as 水 and read it shuǐ. So what the Japanese began to do is write 水 to mean water, while pronouncing it as the word they’d always used for water: mizu.

Confusing enough? Apparently not. The Japanese also decided to go ahead and start adopting Chinese pronunciations of certain words and roots into their own language. Let’s go back to the example of water to illustrate: up until now, the Japanese were simply pronouncing 水 as mizu. Now what they began to do is give it a second, Chinese-derived pronunciation: sui.

So today, when a Japanese reader sees the character 水, they need to quickly assess whether the word calls for the Chinese-derived pronunciation or the Japanese native one, e.g. 水中 suichū “underwater” vs. 水色 mizuiro “aqua colored”. Another pair of perhaps more familiar examples uses the character 神 “god” (shin from Chinese and kami in native Japanese): 神道 shintō “the way of the gods” vs. 神風 kamikaze “divine wind”.

It is these characters, initially from Chinese, which are called kanji – regardless of which pronunciation scheme is used.

How they’re used today

Now we’re at the present, and you’re probably wondering, “how do these all fit together?” This is also not totally simple.

Katakana is used much in the same way we use italics in English: for foreign words, for species names, and for onomatopoeia.

Most adjectives, verbs, and nouns are written in kanji. Some kanji are obscure or too difficult to write, so they are substituted with hiragana. But because of their compactness and visual clarity of meaning, kanji are generally preferred when usable.

Hiragana is the catch-all system: it’s the default for cases where the other two don’t apply. It’s for grammatical particles and conjugations, and for words with obscure kanji. It’s also used for children and foreigners studying the language.

Sample sentence

Let’s see all 3 systems in action with this example I made up. Blue indicates hiragana, red indicates katakana, and black indicates kanji.

レストランで友達と昼ご飯を食べました。

Japanese Information レストラン 友達 べました
Transliteration Information resutoran-de tomodachi-to hiru-go-han-wo tabe-ma-shita
Gloss Information restaurant-at friends-with midday-honorific-
rice-dir.obj
eat-formal-past
Translation Information I ate lunch with my friends at a restaurant.

Hopefully this was clear and you learned something. Please leave comments below or contact me using the contact buttons! To explore the world of linguistics more, check out my resources page.


Image source: https://www.oia.hokudai.ac.jp/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/nihongo.jpg

What is linguistics?

One question I’m asked a lot, given my studies in college, is: what is linguistics? (Editor’s note: I also have gotten, “what are linguistics?”) It’s usually followed up with the likes of: Is it just a fancy term for grammar? Are you studying just English linguistics?  So you basically just took a bunch of language courses?

The short answers to the followup questions are no, no, and no. The medium answer is “it’s hard to explain.” But the long answer is – true to form – where the good stuff is.

I think of linguistics as a toolkit. It’s a way to systematically analyze language. And by language, I mean everything from the way words are formed to how we tell stories to regional accents to a language’s evolution over time. Linguistics finds itself bedfellows with a broad range of fields of study, including sociology, psychology, anatomy, history, technology, and cognitive science. Linguists decoded Egyptian hieroglyphs, and linguists created Klingon.

An important aspect of linguistics that differentiates it from the study of English (or what have you) is that it is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Descriptive means a neutral, observation-based way of seeing things; prescriptive refers to the way your English teacher taught you (e.g. don’t end a sentence in a preposition, it’s wrong to say yadda yadda yadda).

There’s a theoretical element to linguistics: How did human language begin? Do bees use bona fide language? Can a computer ever really fully hold a natural conversation?

And there’s a practical side to it too: Why do people add a vowel sound in the middle of the word ‘realtor’? How do women’s speech patterns differ from men’s? Why is the word ‘mama’ the same in almost every language?

Here is the clearest schema I’ve seen of some major branches of linguistics and how they relate to each other:

Unit of speech Field
Conversation
Discourse analysis
Sentence
Syntax
Word
Morphology
Morpheme
(pieces of a word that have meaning)
Phonology
Phoneme
(clusters of sounds)
Phonetics
Sound
Featural analysis
Sound feature

There are many other sub-fields than what I listed right here. Sociolinguistics examines the the societal aspects of things, like in what situations we change the way we speak. Semiotics is the relationship between words and their meanings. Language development looks at how children acquire language, as opposed to the way that adults learn new languages. This list goes on and on, but for the purposes of this post I just want to give a basic view of what’s out there.

What linguistics can do for you (the upside)

I am tempted to tell you that studying linguistics works the miracles that downloading the Yo app does, but I would be a fraud to compare the two. But it helps me every day and opened my eyes in a number of ways. It can for you, too.

Mastering phonetics and phonology can help you shake that accent you’ve been trying to get rid of, or perfect your foreign pronunciation. Studying syntax can make figuring out new grammars effortless. Discourse analysis tunes you into subtext in conversations. Semantics will make you be misunderstood less.

What linguistics will do to you (the downside)

The downside of linguistics is that you can’t turn it off, and the subject matter surrounds us 24/7. If you are a math person, you can find many applications of numbers and patterns, but it’s not embedded in every single utterance and every single communication anyone makes. So what’s annoying to me – and ten times more annoying to my friends and family – is that it’s always on. I can’t help analyzing and commenting on how they used this unusual structure or how their accent manifested itself on such-and-such a phrase. So beware: you might drive your loved ones insane with your new-found powers.

Learn more/resources

I’ve compiled some of my favorite free resources in my links page, where you can learn and explore.


Image source: http://www.sjsu.edu/linguistics/pics/lld_wordle_660px.jpg