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Japanese names are usually written in kanji, although some names use hiragana or even katakana, or a mixture of kanji and kana. While most "traditional" names use kun'yomi (native Japanese) kanji readings, a large number of given names and surnames use on'yomi (Japanese sound, often Chinese-based) kanji readings as well.
Shinjitai (Japanese: 新字体, "new character form") are the simplified forms of kanji used in Japan since the promulgation of the Tōyō Kanji List in 1946. Some of the new forms found in shinjitai are also found in simplified Chinese characters, but shinjitai is generally not as extensive in the scope of its modification.
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
To alleviate any confusion on how to pronounce the names of other Japanese people, most official Japanese documents require Japanese to write their names in both kana and kanji. [31] Chinese place names and Chinese personal names appearing in Japanese texts, if spelled in kanji, are almost invariably read with on'yomi. Especially for older and ...
Non-kanji characters are given a Japanese-language common name (日本語通用名称, Nihongo tsūyō meishō), but some provisions for these names do not exist. [k] The names of kanji, on the other hand, are mechanically set according to the corresponding hexadecimal representation of their code in UCS/Unicode. The name of a kanji can be ...
The earliest Japanese romanization system was based on Portuguese orthography.It was developed c. 1548 by a Japanese Catholic named Anjirō. [2] [citation needed] Jesuit priests used the system in a series of printed Catholic books so that missionaries could preach and teach their converts without learning to read Japanese orthography.
The Japanese era name (Japanese: 元号, Hepburn: gengō, "era name") or nengō (年号, year name), is the first of the two elements that identify years in the Japanese era calendar scheme. The second element is a number which indicates the year number within the era (with the first year being "gan ( 元 ) ", meaning "origin, basis"), followed ...
In works aimed at adult Japanese speakers, furigana may be used on a word written in uncommon kanji; in the mass media, they are generally used on words containing non-Jōyō kanji. Furigana commonly appear alongside kanji names and their romanizations on signs for railway stations, even if the pronunciation of the kanji is commonly known.