Advanced English Skills

/27/19)
* "Polyscriptal Taiwanese" (7/24/10)
* "The Roman Alphabet in Cantonese" (3/23/11)
* "Love those letters" (11/3/18)
* "Acronyms in China" (11/2/19)
* "Ask Language Log: The alphabet in China" (11/6/19)

➖ @EngSkills ➖

all kinds of weird errors show up in what one sees.

It sounds like the rules are not written in stone, that there's a lot of flexibility and informality in how hiragana, katakana, and kanji usage plays out.

And here's a response from Nathan Hopson (formerly at Nagoya University), who teaches at the University of Bergen in Norway:

I've actually had this conversation with a colleague in Japanese linguistics. She thinks it's a viable research topic, i.e., that it's not fully explained as a phenomenon.
There are some cases of words written in all three scripts in common usage:

癌　がん　ガン (cancer)

There is a different feel to each. I can't confidently articulate a full explanation for all three, but がん is definitely trying to soften the blow or make the whole thing less terrifying (e.g. がん保険, gan hoken for insurance).

拉麺　ラーメン　らーめん (ramen)
ガン is also an example of katakana being used for a "native" Japanese word because long strings of hiragana can be hard to parse — we expect them to be grammatical markers such as verb conjugations, etc.:

ごみ　ゴミ (waste/trash/garbage)
Another type would be animal names, where the katakana is sometimes acting, explicitly or implicitly, as the Latin scientific name and sometimes as ゴミ above:

犬　いぬ　イヌ (where the last can mean Canus canus)

人　ひと　ヒト (where the last can mean Homo sapiens)
All this is further complicated by the choice to add the annotative glosses called ルビ (rubi, from the 5.5-pt font size used for interlinear annotations). The most common type is furigana, which gloss the readings of kanji. They are often seen with characters beyond the 2000-ish basic kanji or with proper nouns, etc., for which the reading is obscure, etc. That obviously depends a great deal on audience. But you can also use, for instance, the readings of synonymous kanji (or even antonyms, etc.) to add what I guess we'd call "color" or "flavor": glossing 迷宮 (meikyū) with ラビリンス might mean "The Labyrinth" instead of "labyrinth, while 退治 (taiji) with こども makes a fetus an (unborn) child.
* h/t Aya Homei for those two examples
If I want you to read 日本 as ニッポン instead of にほん, I could either do that by just writing out the katakana or glossing the kanji.
In any case, in the majority of instances, orthographic choice reflects some assumptions about audience (what do they know, expect, etc?). There are conventions, which we use without a lot of intentionality, but the thing about conventions is, breaking them deliberately is fun. It's part of the word play we all engage in, whatever the language.

After I shared these observations with Sanae, she replied:

Thank you so much for such a generous response and for extending my question to others you know. I get the general consensus that the orthography variations are an individual stylistic decision, which I agree is a feature of all languages (perhaps not in orthography, but the general concept of variations and flexibility in language). This just happened to catch my eye in recent months so I really appreciate the extra background knowledge and examples that were provided.

As one can readily see, Sanae's questions about variation in Japanese orthography lead to larger issues of deviation from standards (not standard deviations!) in language in general. Selected readings

* "Katakana nightmare" (6/20/19)
* "The esthetics of East Asian writing" (4/7/12)
* "Ye Olde English katakana" (8/11/14)
* "More katakana, fewer kanji " (4/4/16)
* "Kanji as commodity " (4/30/18)
* "The economics of Chinese character usage " (9/2/11)
* Mark Hansell, "The Sino-Alphabet: The Assimilation of Roman Letters into the Chinese Writing System," Sino-Platonic Papers, 45 (May, 1994), 1-28 (pdf)
* Helena Riha, "Lettered Words in Chinese:  Roman Letters as Morpheme-syllables" (pdf)
* "Zhao C: a Man Who Lost His Name" (2/27/09)
* "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 3" (11/25/18)
* "The actuality of emerging digraphia" (3/10/19)
* "Sememic spelling" (3[...]

Language Log
Mix and match Japanese orthography

Most Language Log readers are aware that the Japanese writing system consists of three major components — kanji (sinoglyhs), hiragana (cursive syllabary), and katakana (block syllabary).  I would argue that rōmaji (roman letters) are a fourth component, as they are in the Chinese writing system.

How do people decide when to switch among the different components of the Japanese writing system?  Of course, custom and usage determine when to use one and when to use another.  (It's a bit like masculine, feminine, and neuter in gender based languages [a frequent and recent topic on Language Log] — you don't ask why, you just do it].)  In most cases, convention has fixed which of the three main components of the writing system is used for a particular purpose.  On the other hand, since I began learning Japanese half a century ago, I noticed a fairly conspicuous slippage regarding what I had been led to believe were predetermined practices.

Sanae Heist, a senior studying linguistics at Columbia University, brought this whole matter to the surface when she wrote to me as follows:
I understand you study Chinese, but I was wondering if you happened to know any information about the contexts in which Japanese people switch the writing systems, i.e. hiragana or katakana for words that would traditionally be written in kanji or katakana for words typically in hiragana. I have caught my mother (Japanese), myself (half Japanese heritage speaker), and some Japanese friends doing this, and although I've yet to grasp the exact context for when this occurs (I usually just mimic how the word was written by the other person), I am curious to know whether there's a larger pragmatic role than just for emphasis or for convenience.

Interesting questions.

My observations are that there is a lot of variability in the way people mix and match hiragana, katakana, and kanji.

Here's a response from a specialist on Japanese orthography, J. Marshall Unger, emeritus professor at Ohio State University:

After 1945, the Ministry of Education established rules about kanji and kana to be taught in school. Briefly, only approved kanji and their approved readings* should be used (some exceptions for kanji in personal names had to be permitted); only simplified kanji were approved (again, some exceptions had to be tolerated); hiragana were to be the default syllabary for Japanese words not written with kanji; katakana were to be used for non-Japanese words. One was not to use the spelling of long vowels in hiragana when using katakana, nor vice versa.

*This subsumes cases of a kanji followed by okurigana; e.g. 分かる was specified for wakaru, but one finds 分る for the same word in pre-war writing.

Prior to 1945, there was much greater variation in how people wrote. I recall that there's a novel by Tanizaki in which each chapter is supposed to be the diary entry of a husband or his wife: he uses katakana as the default and rather formal language; she uses hiragana and a more vernacular style.

I don't think what the student is asking about goes much beyond words such as taihen, which can be 大変or たいへん, which can be written either way unless (s)he is including the wild variations one sees in manga balloons, etc. As the example of taihen shows, common SJ words may be written in hiragana—obscure SJ words that use kanji not on the approved list have to be written, in whole or in part, using hiragana, or else be replaced with synonyms. Of course, when the LDP introduced the joyo kanji, the list of approved kanji was demoted to the status of a 'guide' (meyasu): in theory, any damned kanji can now be used, and word-processor makers have been adding kanji of extremely limited utility to their inventories ever since. Now that people often rely on conversion routines to produce text rather than writing by hand, [...]