ENGL Week 5 Research Final Essay

Submitted By tacozchili
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The modern Japanese language consists mainly of three types of writings, the complex Kanji, the cursive Hiragana, and the angular Katakana. The combination of all three of these scripts are used for writing. In addition to these three, there is also the rarely used
Romaji.

Before the invention of Kanji, the Japanese only had a spoken language, as is true of many languages. There was no way to write anything. When they came in contact with the
Chinese, they were in fascinated by their Hanzi, or Chinese characters. They borrowed them, then integrated the Hanzi into their own language, creating Kanji. 漢字

The Kanji writing scripts are used for most nouns, such as 雨 ame (rain) or 雪 yuki (snow). In addition to Kanji is also used for the occasional adverbs, such as 突然 totsuzen (suddenly) or 明日ashita (tomorrow). Katakana was originally considered “men’s writing”. The katakana syllabary consists of
48 syllables. It was created by Buddhist monks during the 9th century (early Heian Period) as a form of shorthand.
Today, Katakana has been used mainly to transcribe foreign words. Such as people’s names and the names of countries or places. Some examples are イギリス Igirisu (United
Kingdom) or イタリア Itaria (Italy). However, Katakana is also used for onomatopoeic and mimetic words, and for emphasis similarly to how italics are used in English. Some examples of onomatopoeic words are ニャー nyaa (meow) or キンコン kin kon (ding dong) Hiragana, much like Katakana writing, is from the same kana branch and is a simplified form of Kanji.
Hiragana, which were originally called onnade or “women’s hand”, were originally created by women who weren’t allowed to use Kanji or Katakana. It was created by breaking down the
Kanji writings into forty­eight different symbols based on the forty­eight different sounding syllables that already existed within the language. However, today only forty­six are used. The sounds ゑ we and ゐ wi have been rendered nearly obsolete. Each syllable is represented

by a single mora ­a single character­ to e.g. ひ hi, ら ra, が ka, and な na, which together read ひらがな hiragana. As Katakana are based on the phonetic foreign name such as Kelsey cannot be perfectly translated in Japanese as they do not have letters or characters that represent each letter in the name. The name must be broken into syllables that are represented by the 48 Katakana.
Kehl­see becomes ke­lu­si which can be represented by the Katakana ケ ke ル ru シ shi. Although rarely used by the Japanese themselves, Romaji is often the easiest writing style for most foreign language learners to learn as it uses the Latin alphabet system
(AaBbCc). For this reason, it is often the