by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-10-10 08:07:22+00:00
> Japan’s kanji alphabet

> if you call them kanji, they're Japanese characters [...] Kanji are very much not syllabic

@2, the reason Japanese speakers use the designation 'Kanji' is the same reason that English use 'Latin', as a reference to their origin. To insist that Kanji are Japanese and not Chinese would be as strange as insisting that English does not use the Latin alphabet: it's not wrong in the sense that Japanese and English have added to their respective scripts, but it's also wrong in that it obscures the fact that the idea, the system, the forms, and the principle values (semantics and sounds) are inherited.

Put another way, if the British were to deny in the future that they're not using the 'Latin' alphabet but the 'British alphabet' (hard cultural Brexit?) and demand the Unicode consortium to split it off to a dedicated block (as they did for Coptic, which was initially considered a mere variant of Greek), we then have to wonder whether the French, German, Polish, Portuguese languages all should get their own dedicated block. That of course is denying the fact that major parts of Europe all use the same Latin alphabet, each with their own quirks and flavors added according to locale.

So when "you call them kanji, they're Japanese characters" but only with respect to usage, meaning, sound, and sometimes form, but not with respect to the overall system or character repertoire, which is shared with Chinese.

Also this entire branch of the thread is dangling from a faulty premise in The Fine Article, viz. "Japan’s kanji alphabet", which screams "writer knows zilch about this". Kanji are not an alphabet. Maybe they mixed it up and wanted to write "Japan's kana alphabet" which is sort-of similar but less wrong. It's acceptable if you think of an 'alphabet' as 'glyph repertoire', but then Cuneiform (or any of the roughly 10~15 orthographies and languages from Sumerian to Ugaritic) would be an 'alphabet' too (only somewhat true for Ugaritic, which is esssentially an abjad).

I have to admit that there's apparently no very commonly used word that comes to mind to complete the phrase "Japan's kana ___" that is not wrong ('alphabet'), or specific ('syllabary'), but general and could also be used to fill the gaps in "the Sumerian cuneiform ___", "Chinese ??? ___", "Egyptian demotic ___", "Egyptian hieroglyphics ___", except for "glyph repertoire". "Inventory" is maybe less arcane but also very generic. "Glyph" in the sense of "symbol used for writing" is maybe too academic for a lot of people. "Characters" is another popular choice. "Chinese characters", "Japanese Kana characters", ... but "Latin characters"? Maybe. "Character set" has become a comparatively widely used term already, so yeah.

> Kanji are very much not syllabic. But Chinese characters are.

The even more interesting aspect that (strangely enough) people like John DeFrancis apparently glossed over when discussing the nature of the CJK writing systems is that Japanese is quite a bit closer to 'ideographic' writing. For one thing, the phonetic clues that DeFrancis rightfully stresses so much are often much less useful in Japanese, and on the other hand, characters often have both a 'borrowed' and a 'native' reading while retaining the basic meaning; for example, 犬 can be read 'ken' (a reading borrowed from Chinese) or 'inu' (an indigenous reading), both signifying 'dog'. These characters work like Hindu-Arabic numerals in that the writing indicates am 'idea', a sense (a numerical value) that can be read out in multiple different sounds depending on language, or even within one language (ex. 3, 3rd, 30; 2, 2nd, 20).