Places, Images, Times & Transformations

Japanese Writing System II

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Jukujikun

Jukujikun is closely related to the first example cited for furigana. It refers to writing the Japanese name for a Chinese compound next to the word in kana and to the practice of reading of Chinese compounds by their equivalents in Japanese. For instance, 梅雨 is a Chinese compound referring to sustained rains that fall on Japan in the month of June. Its on reading (i.e., Chinese pronunciation adopted into Japanese) is baiu (Ch. meiyu). The native Japanese word for this seasonal rain is tsuyu. As in the case of ateji, no mora in tsuyu is related to any traditional pronunciations of these two characters. When the word 梅雨 is used in a text, it may be accompanied by its kun reading tsuyu as its furigana.

This jukujikun - the practice of showing a Japanese equivalent of a Chinese compound as furigana or reading it in a Japanese way - has come to serve another purpose. Consider 拳銃 'handgun, pistol'. You may find this word in a murder mystery appearing with furigana of チャカ chaka. Chaka is a slang word for a handgun. What is happening here is that a normal, common compound known to everyone is assigned here a different pronunciation. This is a device to show that the author not only would like the word 拳銃 be read as chaka, but also attempts to clue in the reader that, in the world of criminals, handguns are referred to by a slang word chaka. This is a bit like abbreviated footnoting. A comparable situation in English might be that the word "heat" ("He is packing heat") in a murder mystery is annotated with the word gun. Authors nowadays have taken advantage of this annotation system. Thus the same character 女 may be given a number of different readings. If none is given, it has the standard variety of pronunciations—onna, jo, or nyo. When furignana is given, the reading depends entirely on what the author would like the reader to conjure up - it could be suke (slang, girlfriend) in a murder mystery, burondo (a blond), yatsu (that woman) in a novel in which the woman is referred to casually, or senyorīta (a young girl in Spanish) in a diary of someone traveling to Puerto Rico. Similarly, a trendy word IT (abbreviation of information technology) in IT 革命 "IT revolution" may not be immediately comprehensible to the Japanese reader, so the writer may give it an innovative furigana, right above IT, such as 情報技術 or 情報テクノロジー, both of which are Japanese equivalents for "information technology."

Reading Japanese may be said to require a lot of gymnastics and contortions of this sort; and indeed those techniques for expressing meaning do require some getting used to.

Jindai moji

Jindai moji 神代文字 (lit. "writing dating from the mythological times") is a term still in use which refers to the writing system purported to have been in place to write Japanese before the introduction of Chinese characters. This would of course predate Japanese missions to China. First described in Kannahi fumi no tutae 神字日文伝 in 1819 by the famous Tokugawa scholar Hirata Atsutane (平田篤胤, 1776-1843), his historical theories have now been discounted as having no real credibility. Jindai moji contains symbols for only 47 sounds. This corresponds to the number of existing kana at the beginning of the 19th century, a fact which aroused suspicion. Many scholars now think that classical Japanese had an eight vowel system, and the 47 symbols would therefore not have been adequate. More troublesome still is the fact that there are no extant documents written with this set of characters. The symbols used in jindai moji resemble those in Hangul, the phonetic writing system of Korea, and it is speculated that Hirata obtained his initial inspiration from that script for inventing jindai moji.

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