Talk:Kanji/Archive 1

message: The following passage was moved from the article:
:Kanji were originally introduced into Japan from Korea during the period of close contact between the Yamato state and Baekje, one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea.
I don't know what Sewing referred to, but it may be Suishu->Liechuan->Woguo:
:敬佛法, 於百濟求得佛經, 始有文字.
But the 6th century is too late.
Wani (judging from the name, he would be a Lelang Chinese) is said to have brought the Analects and the Thousand-Character Classic during the reign of Emperor Ojin. However, neither Kojiki or Nihonshoki says that he introduced Chinese characters for the first time.
You can find an interesting passage in Samguk Sagi->History of Baekje->King Geunchogo
:古記云 百濟開國已來 未有以文字記事 至是 得博士高興 始有書記 然高興未嘗顯於他書 不知其何許人也
This means that according to an old record, Baekje started to use characters to record facts at the same period as Wani came to Japan.
I've introduced some stuffs to examine the date, but there is currently no accepted theory. Considering the close contact with the Lelang (and then Daifang) commandery, that would be earlier than Sewing thinks. --Nanshu 00:21, 19 Oct 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: Appropriately, the most common Kanji to be found in daily usage is 日, "sun", which gives rise to the name "land of the rising sun".
What is the point of this? -- Taku 00:23, Oct 20, 2003 (UTC)
----
30,300 hits for "Kanzi", but this brings up unrelated hits, so...
709 hits for Kanzi and Japan
2,430 for Kanzi and Japanese
This should be sufficient to allow it to be kept. WhisperToMe 03:25, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

text: As it is of slight importance, I've moved it towards the end of the paragraph. This does not imply that its existence is trivial, however. --Taoster 05:48, 19 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Miscellaneous comments 

message: Recently on Wiktionary, a new user has been adding terms like "simplified" and "traditional" to Japanese entries, which has confused those of us who know a little about about Japanese or Chinese. It turns out that Japanese has the terms 旧字体 (kyū-jitai) and 新字体 (shin-jitai) which are to some degree analogous to Chinese's 繁體字 / 繁体字 (fántǐzì) Traditional characters and 簡體字 / 简体字 (jiǎntǐzì) Simplified characters.
I'd love to find out as much about this as I can but there's little information in English on the internet. — Hippietrail 09:45, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ky&#363;-jitai & Shin-jitai 

message: I've changed around some of the links to hopefully make them more useful; I've also added more of them. Some might think I've overlinked the article; if so, just remove the most egregious cases.
I've also tried to standardize the appearance of the Japanese words used throughout the article, rendering them all in italics rather than "quotes" or with no special formatting. Exceptions are (most) references to the main writing systems: kanji, hiragana and katakana (using italics for the latter two only in the first section when they are more or less defined). Since other Wikipedia articles say there are four Japanese writing systems, I've added a mention of romaji to the intro (sans macron and sans italics, for consistency with the other three systems and with the title of the article it links to).
Finally, I've completely rewritten the section on readings. I hope I've made it flow better. The factual information I added is mostly from Kodansha's Compact Kanji Guide () and Let's Learn Kanji (also Kodansha, ).
I tried to use all the info that was already in the article, but I had to excise this sentence:
*The word "kanji"(漢字) is a perfect example of this. Its pronunciation is derived from the Chinese word "hanzi".
- dcljr 04:49, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Massive rewriting 

message: From Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English
*Article: :ja:さいたま市#地名の由来 (just this segment)
*Corresponding English-language article: Saitama, Saitama#Toponym
*Worth doing because: Saitama seems to be one of the few large cities whose name doesn't have Kanji. The origin of this name is hard to find on English webpages.
*Originally requested by:  --Menchi 10:29, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  proper nouns (place and personal names) that do not (cannot) have Kanji 

message: This is my first posting in wikipedia, please be gentle. I wanted to post here before I make the edit.
I note that this article refers to hiragana as a "cursive" writing system.   I believe this is incorrect because Cursive as documented in Wikipedia refers to writing where the characters are joined.  Hirigana characters no more joined than katakana or kanji characters.  I believe the mistake comes from the similarity of "cursive" to "curvilinear," which I believe is the correct word.
I will make the edit if nobody objects.
Toastcontrol 11:00, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I think I'm the one who put the word "cursive" in there in the first place. I agree that it may not be a perfect fit, in that hiragana characters are not run together (generally--although if you look at the scrolls from the Tales of Genji, you'll see they can be). Rather, the many strokes that go into the source kanji are consolidated and run together. There may be a more precise word for this phenomenon than "cursive," but I'm not convinced that "curvilinear" is it (which might better describe gyosho-style kanji). adamrice 20:25, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Changing "cursive" hiragana to "curvilinear" 

message: I have expanded the JIS Kanji section to cover the other JIS standards. JimBreen 02:45, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: JIS Kanji

message: I have added a new section extracted from my page at: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/kanjitypes.html. It seemed appropriate given the other categorization of kanji in the article. JimBreen 05:39, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: That's an excellent addition, Jim. adamrice 17:11, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: This duplicates the contents of the pages Chinese characters and Chinese character classification. I'm not sure it belongs here anyway, since it is not specifically about the Japanese use of the characters. I suggest merging this into one of the two above pages. --DannyWilde 14:51, 13 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Types of Kanji: by category 

message: If these names are to be used, they should be used for the article titles as well. For example, "joyo kanji" article should be moved to "daily use kanji". Anyway the names appear to be arbitrary translations. Unless the Japanese authorities who give the Japanese names like joyo kanji have also given these rather unlikely and frankly silly English names, it is better to use the Japanese name since it is unambiguous and no one I have ever heard of talks about "daily use kanji" in English, everyone says "joyo kanji". Anyway I removed all the English names from the article. Further, there were a lot of "side remarks" in the article, and I removed them all since they might be appropriate in a general article on the Japanese language, but seem out of place in an article on kanji. --DannyWilde 14:44, 13 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Daily-use characters etc. and side remarks.

message: Nice job, everyone, on this article. I did some work on it several months ago but haven't been back until today. I'm wondering, is it time to nominate this for Featured Article status? - dcljr (talk) 18:45, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Good enough?