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2007-09-17 15:15:14 · 6 answers · asked by awe 2 in Society & Culture Languages

6 answers

The above (askawow47) is correct, but if you want to know the Reason why they mix different systems, maybe one should stress that Chinese is an uninflected language, whereas Japanese is inflected, so it has many different inflected forms of words. When they used the Chinese character for a word, they still needed other characters to express the different word endings that occured in Japanese but not in Chinese, so instead they used a phonetical system of writing the grammatical endings. Likewise, the manifold particles in the Japanese language couldn't be written in the same way as the entirely unrelated Chinese system of particles, so they were also better written phonetically.

Why the Japanese use two different phonetical writing systems is a more difficult question. Originally, there were two different systems for men and women, but now the "women's" system is the one used for grammatical endings (and some other things), whereas the "men's" system is used mainly for transcribing non-Chinese loan words, foreign names and some special expression like onomatopoetics and emphatic words.

Apart from giving more problems for everyone trying to learn Japanese writing, this state of things also gives some extraordinary possibilities to express nuances just by choosing another writing system than you usually choose for a given word or expression, which is widely used in advertising, art and poetry. A very common way of attracting attention in advertising, for example, is using katakana (the "men's" writing) for words usually written in kanji (Chinese characters).

2007-09-18 07:41:12 · answer #1 · answered by juexue 6 · 1 0

there are 3 types of japanese writing

hiragana
katakana
and kanji

hiragana is used for words originally used in japan that wernt taken from english or another foreign language

katakana is used in most new japanese words taken from english and put into a japanese style of writing

kanji is used to represent something

2007-09-17 15:25:42 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 0 0

until the 5th century, when chinese characters (=kanji) were introduced, the japanese had no writing system. thereafter, a system was developed for writing japanese using chinese characters (=kanji). using kanji as a base, the japanese devised two syllabic alphabets -hiragana and katakana. each represents the same 46 syllables, and the alphabets are used together with kanji in writing modern japanese.
kanji was foreign language to japanese. japanese made abbreviation when they read chinese literature. those abbreviations changed to katakana later. japanese also made hiragana from running hand of kanji.
now japanese use kanji for noun and verb. katakana for foreign language. hiragana for particle, conj. etc.

2007-09-17 15:39:35 · answer #3 · answered by askawow 47 7 · 3 0

it is said...well that I've read that back in da day in Japan, the fuedal lords thought that something about important parchment and that why is it that the chinese could write nice and not us right? well the lords conjured up a grip load of writers and made them write nicely hey what do you know we japanese people can also write well ahahahaha

...THE END

2007-09-18 04:35:25 · answer #4 · answered by Karyu Samara 1 · 0 0

get a japanese keyboard

2016-05-17 09:49:31 · answer #5 · answered by Anonymous · 0 0

Egyptians had too
エジプト人はも使用しました

2007-09-18 09:13:51 · answer #6 · answered by Old Witch 3 · 0 0

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