How is the dash character (-) used in Mandarin and the Japanese language?

Question

I understand their use for Japanese name suffixes (e.g. Ryu-kun). But what about other instances? (I can't come up with any now, sorry). Any ideas? I have a hunch it's related to romanisation discrepancies (or changes)...

Answer 1

I wouldn't know about Mandarin, but in Japanese it's used in two different ways.

The first you have given an example of - when using romaji (Latin letters) to write Japanese words, the - is used to separate sections of one word into the individual parts. i.e., Ryu (the name) and kun (the suffix used for boys) have - in between to make it clear that they are two separate parts of the same word. Tokyo city is written Tokyo-To. It's important to realise that the - does not HAVE to be used in this way in romaji, and sometimes isn't! (Yes, it gets confusing..!)

With addresses in romaji it's particularly useful.
2-9-101 Fujisawa-danchi
9999 Fujisawa-machi
Fujisawa-shi
Tokyo-to
Japan
for a fictional example! If all those words were just joined together it would be more complicated for the postal staff trying to sort the mail..!

In normal Japanese writing, the - is usually only used within words in katakana (for writing foreign words ... usually.)

It isn't used to separate in this case, it's used to lengthen the vowel sound. If you take the word New, in romaji it would be written 'nyuu', and in katakana it would be written 'ニュー'. Incidentally, if it was written in hiragana - which may be unusual, but does sometimes happen for a specific reason (like for kindergarteners perhaps,) it would have an extra 'u' instead of the '-'. i.e. 'にゅう'.

Heart;
haato
ハート
はあと

Can't think of any more example for now ... still at least a quarter asleep! (Probably won't wake up properly 'til lunchtime today..!)

Answer 2

Like all establishing cultures, the Japanese spoken language preceded the written language. We recognise little or no approximately the Japanese tradition earlier than the adoption of the Chinese script given that while the Chinese script used to be followed someday earlier than 400AD, the Japanese followed it en-mass and if any proto writing process existed, it used to be deserted fully. But the adoption of the Chinese characters didn't all arise in a single section. There used to be a moment "wave" if you're going to that arise among the past due-seven hundred's and ended across the time of the 2d Mongolian invasion. The moment wave of Chinese affect had extra to do with the pronounciation of the characters than growth of the vocabulary. And this additionally debts for the cause why kanji may also be suggested a couple of method.

Answer 3

yozora above explains it good.

The important thing is that Japanese seldom use romaji, alphabet based syllable, so they don't know how to use the hyphen "-" exactly in Japanese sentence. I can say some have not written romaji in their life.

Japanese has no space to separate letters and words. Then, I often use the hyphen to separate them so that you can understand them easily.

romaji -> roma-ji, where ji means character.
kyotoshi -> kyoto-shi, where shi means city.


By the way, I write kon-nichiwa, not konnichiwa. Because n in "kon" is a different sound from n in "nichiwa". You Americans often say it like konichiwa. It's not a correct pronunciation.