I have a challenge, can you distinguish which character set/s belongs to Japanese & Mandarin?
There are of course differences between Kanji / Hanzi but the “difficult” part is knowing which language is which simply by glancing (unless you know either 日本語 or 中文 that is).
In contrast, do you know any words that are near identical when written down between two “alphabetical” languages based on their spelling?
CN/JP aren’t alphabets.(excepting hiragana and katakana) they’re a logographic language, much like the Egyptian Hieroglyphs.
JP’s kanji stole something like 95% of its characters from CN. the only real way to tell at a glance if a sentence is JP or CN is by looking for hiragana or katakana in the sentence, as JP usually has a few of them per sentence, while CN does not.
hope this helps your linguistic endeavours! :)
The kana aren’t alphabets either. They’re syllabaries. The closest they get to alphabetic are the characters that represent the single vowel sounds, A, I, O, E, U… aaand N for some reason, but those are very restricted in how and where they’re allowed to be used.
huh, the more you know.
I’ve always called them alphabets because of their phentic similarity to abcde/etc as each character represents one sound.
Alphabets are finer grained. Every alphabetic letter is either a consonant or vowel. Sometimes a letter can be one or the other depending on the specific language and context, but nonetheless, consonant or vowel.
Syllabaries pack two or more of these into a single character. Most of the kana are consonant-vowel pairings, with the exception of the six I mentioned previously, and as a result you can end up with a lot more symbols than a pure alphabet would need.
You can also go the other way into abjads, which generally only write consonants. Vowels take the form of optional marks on those consonants. Hebrew and Arabic are the best known examples of these. And you’d be less inaccurate to call those alphabets to be fair.
Worth noting that while something like 95% taken from Chinese it was taken from traditional Chinese and then underwent it’s own simplification process independently from Chinese. This leads to a lot of subtle and sometimes huge differences between some related kanji and hanzi.
But Egyptian Hieroglyphs aren’t a logographic system. They have logographic elements as well as alphabetic, syllabic and ideographic.
plus: sinojapanese characters often have distinct forms from their siblings in simplified or traditional japanese. so it’s possible to tell which is which without the presence of kana