Kanji

Kanji ({{Audio|ja-kanji.ogg|??}}, literally "Han characters") are Chinese characters used in Japanese. Kanji are one of the five character sets used in the modern Japanese writing system, the other four being hiragana, katakana, the Roman alphabet (r?maji), and Arabic numerals.

Types of Kanji: by Category

See also: Chinese character classification

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The Buddhist scholar Xu Shen, in the Shuowen jiezi ca. 100 CE, classified Chinese characters six categories (?? J rikusho). The classification is open to interpretational differences, and some characters can legitimately be regarded as belonging to more than one category. The first four categories refer to the putative structure of characters; the last two refer to unusual functions of characters.

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(For a table of all the ???? broken down by category see this page, from which the above description has been extracted.)

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???? (sh?keimoji)

These are often called "pictographs" in English (?? is also the Japanese word for Egyptian hieroglyphs). The characters are rough sketches of the object they represent. ? is an eye tipped on its side, ? is a tree, etc. Some are so stylized they are not often really recognizable.

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???? (shijimoji)

These are called "logograms", "simple ideographs" and sometimes just "symbols" in English. They are usually simple and represent an abstract concept such as a direction: ?: up/above, ?: down/below, etc.

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???? (kaiimoji)

Often called "compound ideographs", or just "ideographs". These are usually a combination of pictographs that combine to present an overall meaning. An example is ? (mountain pass) made from ? (mountain), ? (up) and ? (down). Another is ? (rest) from ? (person) and ? (tree).

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???? (keiseimoji)

These are "semasio-phonetic" or "phonetic-ideographic" characters in English. They are by far the largest category, making up about 85% of characters. Typically they are made up of two components, one of which indicates the meaning or semantic context, and the other the pronunciation. (The pronunciation really relates to the original Chinese, and may now only be distantly detectable in the modern Japanese ON reading of the kanji. The same is true of the semantic context, which may have changed over the centuries or in the transition from Japanese to Chinese.)

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As examples of this, consider the kanji with the ? shape: ?, ?, ?, ?, etc. All are related to word/language/meaning. Similarly kanji with the ? (rain) shape (?, ?, ?, ?, ?, etc.) are almost invariably related to weather. Kanji with the ? (temple) shape on the right (?, ?, ?, ?, etc.) usually have an ON reading of SHI or JI. Sometimes one can guess the meaning and/or reading simply from the components. However, exceptions do exist -- for example, neither ? nor ? have anything to do with weather (at least in their modern usage), and ? has an ON reading of TAI.

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???? (tench?moji)

This group are sometimes called "derivative characters", and is rather vaguely defined. It refers to kanji where the meaning or application has become extended. For example, ? is used for 'music' and 'comfort, ease', with different pronunciations in Chinese reflected in Sino-Japanese gaku 'music' and raku 'pleasure'.

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???? (kashamoji)

These are called "phonetic loan characters." Historically, they were the predecessors of the "phonetic-ideographic" characters. For example, ? in ancient Chinese was originally a pictograph for 'wheat'. Its syllable was homophonous with the verb meaning 'to come' and the character is used for that verb as a result, without any embellishing "meaning" element attached.

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