is a minimal grammatical unit (sometimes referred to as a minimal unit of meaning) which forms the building block of words. To give an example from English, ‘book’ is one morpheme and also one word, but ‘books’ is one word but two morphemes, since it can be broken down into two functional units (morphemes), viz. ‘book’ and ‘-s’ (noun plural marker). A particular morpheme is not always pronounced the same: in the word ‘eggs’, for instance, the noun plural marker is pronounced as if it were written ‘z’.
NJK, meaning non-Jōyō kanji, is used in this book to refer to characters which are not included in the expanded Jōyō kanji list of 2010 (2,136 characters) but are included in Nelson’s Japanese-English Character Dictionary (ca. 5,400 characters). The purpose of this is to recognize that there are many characters outside the Jōyō kanji list which can sometimes be encountered in modern Japanese texts. This is admittedly only a ‘rough and ready’ arrangement, for two reasons. Firstly, the Nelson dictionary includes various characters which the reader is very unlikely to encounter in modern Japanese texts, e.g. 龠 ‘flute’, which is included necessarily because it is one of the 214 determinatives (or ‘radicals’, as Nelson calls them, following the older terminology). Secondly, ‘NJK’ is a term used in this book to contrast with ‘CO’, meaning ‘Chinese only’ (either modern or pre-modern texts). What this means is only that CO characters are not listed in the Nelson dictionary; this by itself is no guarantee that CO characters will never appear in a modern Japanese text. Despite these provisos, it is thought that the designations NJK and CO will still be of some value to the reader as a general indication.
Phonetic with associated sense: refers to the phonetic element in a compound graph, with the phonetic element also having a semantic function, but one which typically is different from its usual dictionary meaning; this different meaning is due in a particular case to a connection to a word-family in Chinese. For instance, 扱 1012 ‘handle, treat as’ consists of 扌 34 ‘hand’ and 及 1202 ‘reach’; 及 functions here as phonetic with the associated sense ‘take in, gather’, and not in its usual dictionary sense ‘handle, treat as’. Another example is 男, consisting of 力 78 ‘strength’ and 田 63 ‘rice-field, paddy field’, but here involving 田 as phonetic with the associated sense ‘endure’. If further details and examples are needed, see ‘Word-Families and the Chinese Script’ (Section 3 above).
Traditional form: in the case of modern Japanese, refers to older character shapes based on those in printed versions of Kangxi zidian which were adopted in early official Japanese government lists such as the first Jōyō kanji list of 1923 (1,962 characters) and then abbreviated in the Tōyō kanji list of 1946 (1,850 characters) and later official lists including the Kaitei Jōyō kanji list of 2010 (2,136 characters). In some cases, there are differences in the shape of a graph between Kangxi zidian and the first Jōyō kanji List of 1923. There is, in other words, a degree of looseness in the term ‘traditional form’. See also ‘Printed Texts and the Calligraphic Tradition’ (Section 6 above).
Variant (or variant form) is used primarily to refer to an alternative shape for a particular character, e.g. 髙 is an alternative shape for 高 132 ‘tall, high’. Such variants are described in relation to a norm such as the Kangxi zidian or the Jōyō kanji list of 2010. What constitutes a variant can differ according to the period and the country or jurisdiction, and so what is presented as the norm in terms of character shape in Kangxi zidian often differs from the norm in the 2010 Jōyō kanji list. ‘Variant’ is also sometimes used in this book to refer to the alternative shape(s) of a determinative when occurring as an element in a compound graph, e.g. 火 8 ‘fire’ changes in shape to 灬 in 煮 1431 ‘boil, cook’.
Limitations of This Book
This book does not seek to be a comprehensive dictionary of characters as used in Japanese: its scope is limited in principle to the 2,136 characters of the Revised General Character (Kaitei Jōyō kanji) List officially adopted in Japan in 2010, though in the process of explaining the etymologies for that list many other characters are analyzed for the benefit of those readers looking for greater detail. Nor does it deal with the now relatively minor irregularities of kana spelling in the modern kana spellings. Readers who are looking for model shapes as a guide for everyday writing practice and other information such as stroke order and stroke count should refer to A Guide to Reading and Writing Japanese, which is another work in the Tuttle Language Library.
Christopher Seeley
Christchurch, New Zealand
December 2015
The Japanese Writing System:
A Brief Sketch
Beginnings
The first contact of the Japanese with writing was when items such as inscribed coins, swords, and bronze mirrors were brought over from China in the first few centuries AD. The writing that was brought over to Japan at that period was no different from the writing in China itself, i.e., Chinese characters, used to write the Chinese language. Initially, it would have been difficult for the Japanese even to understand the nature and function of writing, as this was something completely new. Over time, though, they started to become familiar with the concept of writing and subsequently learned—with the help of teachers and scribes from China and the ancient Korean kingdoms—to write in what for them was a foreign language. This, of course, was a formidable task, due partly to the very great differences between the Chinese and Japanese languages. In addition, there was the intricate nature of the Chinese script. Gradually, though, the Chinese script was adapted for Japanese. One relatively simple way of doing this was sometimes to use characters just for their sound value to write Japanese directly. So, for instance, we find the Japanese word yama ‘mountain’ represented in the eighth-century poetry anthology called Man’yōshū as 夜麻, using 夜 not for its meaning ‘night’ but purely for its on reading (i.e., Chinese-based sound value) YA, and 麻 not for its meaning ‘flax, hemp’ but similarly for its on reading MA. Many of the Man’yōshū poems are in fact written entirely in this way. Using Chinese characters in this way to write Japanese worked and was quite straightforward, but it was a rather longwinded method for texts of any length; we find this point noted in the preface to the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) of 712 AD.
Development of Kana (Japanese Syllabic Signs)
Characters employed just for their sound value often came to be written quite rapidly for economy of effort, and this led to simpler shapes. This meant, for example, that the word kuruma ‘vehicle’ might be written in a ninth century text simply as く るま rather than more elaborately as 久留末 (on readings: KU-RU-MA), and in the same way nusa ‘prayer strip’ could be written efficiently as ぬさ instead of as 奴左 (on readings: NU-SA). This, in fact, was the basic process by which the cursive-type syllabic signs called hiragana evolved. What later evolved as the other set of Japanese syllabic signs called katakana also came about for the same reason of writing efficiency, but by a substantially different process: shape simplification was achieved largely not by writing rapidly, but by omitting part of a Chinese character used for its sound value. For example, whereas the hiragana sign for ka, derived from 加 (on reading: KA), represented the whole of that character (both left and right elements) in the shape か, the katakana sign for the same syllable (ka) evolved from the same character (加) by omitting all of the right-hand side, resulting in カ. The katakana sign リ (ri) evolved in much the same way, in this case taking just the right-hand side of 利 (on reading: RI) (for further information, see kana appendix). Although at the earliest stage signs of both the hiragana and katakana type were used together, gradually there developed a tendency to use them in different contexts. Hiragana script tended to acquire an association of aesthetic refinement, and was often used for native Japanese prose and
