[Multilingual Monday] Kanji Tales, Vol, 7572
One of the reasons I believe I excel at Japanese and not so much in Korean is that the Japanese still use Chinese characters, whereas the Koreans for the most part have gotten rid of Chinese characters as part of their orthography. Both languages maintain a HUGE stock of loanwords from Chinese, but both lack phonetic elements that exist in several Chinese dialects, so even MORE characters end up sounding identical to one another; in written text this poses a particular problem and, in my experience, having a character with a semantic MEANING greatly aids my ability to comprehend what is being read; even if I don't recognize a word, knowing the rough meaning of the characters with which the word is written can help me figure it out, whereas I don't have this luxury in standard modern Korean.
So where am I going with this? It seems that there has been a proposal to increase the number of jouyou kanji and this is what today's article will be about, for the most part. The jouyou kanji (as seen here) is the list of 1,945 characters that are "acceptable" for usage in print. There are many more characters, but you technically don't have to know these characters, and there are rules in place that state that, for general consumption, characters not on this list need to have a pronunciation guide or to not be used at all.
Over the last decade or so, most people have ignored this list, for a few reasons. For starters, the list is VERY arbitrary. It was, for example, acceptable to use the kanji for an antiquated unit of weight (匁, monme), but words like 誰, dare, "who" or 俺, ore, the masculine form of "I" were NOT, for some unfathomable reason. In fact, it's frightening HOW many of the new additions to the set I KNOW, when there are still some characters in the old set that I never can remember. ^^;;;; Secondly, computers have made it far easier to input characters -- just because you can't remember how to write it doesn't mean that you can't type it on a cell phone or on a PC, and because of this much more obscure characters have been used far more frequently.
The new character additions can be found at the end of this article. Wow, it took them this long to add 韓, the first character in the name for South Korea? And 熊, "bear"?? Or 串, "skewer"??? This is just further adding to the feeling that these lists are completely random.
Fun tidbits about the new additions:
I don't know if this was intentional or not, but on the official list (and the article I've linked to, which lists the characters in the same order as the list) put 尻, "ass", next to 拭, "wipe". :: immature giggle :: Technically speaking, 埼玉, "Saitama" (a city not so far from Tokyo that's been beautifully described by some as "the New Jersey" of Japan ^^;;;) couldn't be written with the "allowed" jouyou kanji until these newest characters were added, and one suggested way to handle a character NOT on the list is to write it phonetically. Thus, サイ玉 would have been a proper way to get around this except that サイ is also the phonetic get-around for the non-jouyou kanji 犀, "rhinoceros". Thus, サイ玉 could easily be misinterpreted as "rhinoceros testicles". For those I know who've been to Saitama, they claim this is a rather fitting name for the city. ^^;;;
So where am I going with this? It seems that there has been a proposal to increase the number of jouyou kanji and this is what today's article will be about, for the most part. The jouyou kanji (as seen here) is the list of 1,945 characters that are "acceptable" for usage in print. There are many more characters, but you technically don't have to know these characters, and there are rules in place that state that, for general consumption, characters not on this list need to have a pronunciation guide or to not be used at all.
Over the last decade or so, most people have ignored this list, for a few reasons. For starters, the list is VERY arbitrary. It was, for example, acceptable to use the kanji for an antiquated unit of weight (匁, monme), but words like 誰, dare, "who" or 俺, ore, the masculine form of "I" were NOT, for some unfathomable reason. In fact, it's frightening HOW many of the new additions to the set I KNOW, when there are still some characters in the old set that I never can remember. ^^;;;; Secondly, computers have made it far easier to input characters -- just because you can't remember how to write it doesn't mean that you can't type it on a cell phone or on a PC, and because of this much more obscure characters have been used far more frequently.
The new character additions can be found at the end of this article. Wow, it took them this long to add 韓, the first character in the name for South Korea? And 熊, "bear"?? Or 串, "skewer"??? This is just further adding to the feeling that these lists are completely random.
Fun tidbits about the new additions: