Talk:Ateji

message: Interesting bit of info, but I don't know that is belongs in the article: 
* The old spelling for "America" (amerika) was written in ateji as "亜米利加".  Thus the name for the United States became beikoku (米国), or "rice country", due to the use of the second character in amerika.
brain 06:30, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It's also wrong, as far as I know. The use of 米国 (mei-guo comes from Chinese, where 米 is pronounced somewhat like the second syllable in "uh-MEH-rih-cuh". Likewise, 英 in 英国 (ying-guo, England) is like "EENG-land", etc. They did this because way back when, they needed convenient country names instead of bizarre, alien-sounding syllabic constructions. -MissingNOOO 04:13, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Meiguo is written 美國 (i.e., beautiful country, not rice country).  The above explanation is actually correct and a similar phenomenon is responsible for all the kanji which are abbreviations for countries and languages (仏語 for French [lit. Buddha language], 独語 for German [lit. independent language], etc.).   The 米 rather than 亜 was used because 亜 was already short for 亜細亜 アジア.  Also, as this example should demonstrate, there is not a one-to-one mapping between Chinese names for foreign places (which are all still written using nonsense characters since there is no phonetic alphabet in Chinese) and ateji, even if some (like 英) are the same.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.19.88.88 (talk) 05:23, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  USA 

message: The article says: 
:"Ateji should not be confused with kun'yomi (訓読み), Japanese reading, or native reading, where a kanji is assigned the native Japanese equivalent as its reading."
but in the next paragraph it also says:
:"The converse, where the kanji characters are used for their meaning without regard to their original reading and are assigned a new reading, is also a form of ateji."
Although we're told "not to be confused", the article does not actually make clear the difference. The explanation of kun'yomi (characters used for their meaning and assigned a new reading -- in this case one based on the equivalent native Japanese word) exactly fits what is then termed a type of ateji ("characters are used for their meaning without regard to their original reading and are assigned a new reading").
I'm guessing the distinction is something to do with (i) the fact that kun'yomi were established a long time ago are are now "fixed", such that no new ones are coined (if they were then they would be called ateji?), and (ii) the fact that kun'yomi readings are always native Japanese words rather than loanwords from other languages. I'm not sure enough to want to edit the article, however. 86.182.103.180 (talk) 14:30, 18 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Difference between ateji and kun'yomi 

message: 环境依存文字 does not mean space conserving characters. It just means it depends on a particular OS/encoding to be displayed properly, or literally "environment dependent characters". 
Refer to this paragraph:
Some non-kanji symbols or Latin character abbreviations also have loanword readings, often quite long; a common example is '%' (the percent sign), which has the five kana reading パーセント, while the word "centimeter" is generally written as "cm" (with two half-width characters, so occupying one space) and has the seven kana reading センチメートル (it can also be written as 糎, as with kilometer above, though this is very rare). Many borrowed measurement terms may be written as tiny abbreviations stuffed into a single character space called 環境依存文字 'space conserving characters': ㌢ senchi 'cm', ㌔ kiro 'kilo', etc.
Please refer to here http://www.office-qa.com/win/win61.htm 
|lllll (talk) 17:55, 26 October 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Space conserving characters