why aren't Japanese symbols called letters?

Question

they say there symbols with sounds. excuse me but isn't that what letters are.

Answer 1

Excuse me, but why the hell WOULD - or SHOULD - Japanese 'symbols' (as you call them) be given a Latin-based name?

The clue is in your question - they're JAPANESE!!! So automatically they get a JAPANESE NAME!!! Get it?! The ones you describe as 'symbols with sounds' must be hiragana and katakana, which can be loosely described as phonetic syllabaries. The more complicated characters - kanji - would be better described as words than 'symbols with sounds', so I assume you don't mean those.

Answer 2

Only when I've been beaten with a Japanese dictionary! There are four writing systems in Japan. Kanji are logonyms - each letter is a word - the system is essentially borrowed from Chinese. Then there are the syllabic writing systems Hiragana and Katakana which are conceptually much simpler and easier to learn. Hiragana is used for words which don't have Kanji and Katakana largely for foreign words... Then there's romaji - Japanese written in the roman script used for English. You see it everywhere in Japan these days. Like everything, if you learn when young it's easy. I suspect learning a couple of thousand of Kanji to a comfortable reading and writing level would be very difficult but Hiragana and Katakana not nearly so bad. Japanese keyboards allow you to enter text in kana or romaji (via QWERTY layout) and then have it converted to Kanji later.

Answer 3

Letters represent a single phoneme (a vowel or a consonant). The Japanese symbols that don't represent a whole word (borrowed from Chinese in most cases I think) represent a syllable (vowel + consonant). Apparently the alphabet was only invented once, and all languages that use "letters" borrowed the idea from another language that used "letters" (except the Phonecians, who invented it).

Answer 4

because are symbols.One symbol can mean a word.
Symbolism is the systematic or creative use of arbitrary symbols as abstracted representations of concepts or objects and the distinct relationships in between, as they define both context and the narrower definition of terms. In a narrow context, "symbolism" is the applied use of any iconic representations which carry particular conventional meanings.

Answer 5

the japanese symbols are called logograms that means word-letter(greek logos=word gram=letter) wich means they have a simbol for each word(there are like 2000-3000 of symbols)and they need like 3-4 years of school just to learn writing.letters are a symbols that form words from many letters,but the logograms represent each one a word and they look diferrent

Answer 6

i dont know, but that is an interesting question...lol