It is a common misconception that the Chinese and Japanese languages are related. Never mind that Chinese is just a VERY general term for perhaps hundreds of dialects spoken in China that at times are barely intelligible to one another, it is simply not true. Chinese, in reality, was about as different from Japanese as maybe any other language. Japanese is a fairly unique language as it doesn’t have a definitive relative. Let us discuss this issue.
Prior to the 3rd century, Japanese had no writing system. China, on the other hand, already had a civilization advanced past its time, with a well-established writing system of characters, called Hanzi. The Japanese decided to borrow Chinese characters as a way to give their language a written form.
The problem was, Chinese and Japanese are very different languages. Chinese, for example, does not have tense or conjugation. Japanese, on the other hand, has myriad conjugations of its verbs that can express different tenses, moods, and level of formality.
To add insult to injury, Chinese phonetics are more complex than Japanese phonetics. Worse yet, Chinese is a monosyllabic writing system; each character (or word) contains one syllable. Japanese words can be multiple syllables. So how did the Japanese use a writing system that seems to ill-accommodate their language?
Borrowing a Writing System: A Difficult Fit
This is not a unique phenomenon. Many languages have resorted to Latin script, Arabic script, and Cyrillic script for giving their languages a writing system. But of course, using a foreign writing system not developed specifically to a language is a rather difficult process. Of course, tweaks have been made to writing systems throughout the years. The relationship between Chinese and Japanese is no different.
To accommodate differences, the Japanese used Chinese characters not just for their meaning, but also for phonetic purposes. As cursive became more common in writing the characters, the phonetic characters began getting more simplified in appearance. That is where hiragana and katakana came from; the simplified versions of cursive characters.
Ex (from character to hiragana): 世>せ, 不>ふ, 安>あ, 女>め. Hiragana is now used for grammatical purposes, such as help in conjugating verbs, as well as phonetic purposes and particles to determine components of a sentence clearly. Katakana is used for ‘spelling out’ foreign loan words, like “computer” (konpyūtā コンピューター).
The Birth of Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana
With the arrival of Chinese characters, many words, concepts, names, and meanings that did not originally exist in Japanese were introduced. As a result, many Kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese), was adopted and pronounced as close as possible to their original Chinese phonetics. The phonetics are closer to Cantonese than Mandarin though. Ex: 未来 (mirai: future) comes from 未來 (meiloi in Cantonese).
The word Kanji itself is one of these derivatives 漢字 (kanji: Chinese characters), comes from 漢字 (hanzi). Many of these characters were also present in terms that DID exist in Japanese, so they had two pronunciations. As a result of this, most Kanji have more than one pronunciation, known as 音読み (on’yomi) and 訓読み (kun’yomi), the former being Chinese reading and the latter being Japanese reading. How a Kanji is pronounced depends on if it is a compound with other Kanji, the hiragana that succeed or precede it, or if it is standalone
Modern Divergence: Traditional vs. Simplified Chinese and Kanji
Fast forward to around the last hundred years. The Japanese have accommodated Chinese characters to their language. They now have three writing systems, each serving a different purpose and different ways to pronounce Kanji based on the word, all of these documented of course. Their language was now standardized. However, China soon became a Communist government shorter after WWII.
In an effort to raise literacy rates, the Communist government went about to simplify many Hanzi, so they would be easier to learn to write. Some were based on cursive styles of characters or archaic versions of characters. In most, the general character looks about the same, such as from 語 to 语. Now, the situation between the writing systems of Japan and China gets more complicated. Chinese now has two versions of its writing system: traditional and simplified.
- As of now, there are five possibilities for Kanji and Hanzi.
- -The traditional, simplified, and Kanji all are identical
- Ex: trad. 子, simp. 子, kanji 子
- -The simplified character is the odd one out
- Ex: trad. 親, simp. 亲, kanji 親
- -The traditional character is the odd one out
- Ex: trad. 來, simp. 来, kanji 来
- -The traditional, simplified, and Kanji are all different
- Ex: trad. 圖, simp. 图, kanji 図
- -The Kanji is the odd one out
- Ex: trad. 佛, simp. 佛, kanji 仏
Two Distinct Languages
The history of a language says a lot about how that language works. Japanese has been experiencing Chinese influence for hundreds of years. Kanji is integral to the Japanese language. It is a bit of a misnomer to call Chinese characters as such when referring to Kanji; they are not Chinese to the Japanese.
They are Japanese. Japanese may have been influenced by Chinese, but it is no more related to Chinese than it was before it borrowed Hanzi, setting a chain reaction of change and experimentation.
