Comments on: The exhibition Yasufumi Miyake “Moji wa Ikiteiru”

By: Okano

Okano — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 16:41:19 +0000

That’s good question. But I can’t answer your question right now.
As you mentioned, we always use Kana to express the Latin word like English.
We don’t try to make new Kanji character to express the English word.
I can’t understand Chinese language, they seem to use Kanji to express the foreign word.
Japanese people also used to use Kanji characters as a phonetic equivalent to express latin word, for example a place name.
I’ve googled when Japanese peoplestarted to use Kana to express the Latin word. It seemed to start in the middle of Edo period, around 300 years ago.
I guess the people who lived in Edo period needed to distinguish the word came from foreign country and Japanese word using Kana characters.

By: Claudio Piccinini

Claudio Piccinini — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 15:18:28 +0000

Sorry, mistake: I meant *stopped*, not *started* [in my first line, above].
:=(

By: Claudio Piccinini

Claudio Piccinini — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 15:17:41 +0000

When does Kanji (historically) started to “develop” new ideograms?
I mean, as it’s (probably) with Latin words – as it comes to meaning –, is there in Kanji – as it comes to form – a moment in history where Kanji ideorgams stopped to be “added”.
An example to make it clearer: the English word “capsule” (since it’s modern) needs Kana ideograms to be translated, since a Kanji single form does not exist.
If I am not wrong, another example is – right :=) – Tetsuwan Atomu, where a part of the name is Kanji and the other (probably “Atomu”) is Kana, since it’s a modern word, while Tetsuwan (”with the Iron arm”?) is Kanji, I seem to recall. It’s a thing which really intrigues me…