There has been some confusion in Japanese classes recently about the use of hiragana and katakana over the centuries. Wikipedia is not a big help on this--the description for hiragana simply implies that it is a cursive form of Chinese (which, in an extreme derivation, it is, but that in itself is an entire lecture unbefitting of a blog post).
O.K., let's get this straight. Although hiragana (one of the Japanese phonetic scripts) looks rounder and softer than katakana (the other of the phonetic scripts) does, that does not really give credence to the idea of one being exclusively for women and the other being exclusively for men. What was important was what people were writing, not which sex they were. It so happens that, in the Heian period, women wrote almost exclusively diaries, and men wrote almost exclusively government and official texts, hence the difference in how they wrote. Men were writing in kanbun (classical Chinese) and women were writing in hiragana, mixed with a few kanji. Katakana was developed at the same time as hiragana, but it was largely used for glossing kanbun texts.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, katakana continued to be used for official documents, but it also came to be used in the same way that we use italics in English--for emphasis, and for foreign words. So, it is always important to ask yourself what you are reading before you assume that some odd term in katakana is a foreign loan word.
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6 comments:
Hello Prof. Fessler, I enjoyed the post and the blog in general.
You know, I never really grasped the significance of katakana until going to Japan. I was surprised to see how frequently it was used with regular Japanese words, just to draw attention to it or make it stand out. Not to mention the ubiquity of actual foreign loan words written in katakana.
Now, what I really wanna know about is what's the deal with cigarettes (ie. tobacco). It's written in both katakana (タバコ) & hiragana (たばこ), plus it has kanji (煙草) meaning literally "smoke" (けむり) & "grass" (くさ). According to the dictionary, the origin of the word tobacco is from the mid 16th century Spanish word "tabaco". Which came first? Supposing the Spanish introduced the word to China or Japan, how did it end up with kanji and as both a foreign loan word and a regular word in Japanese? よろしくお願いします。
Good question! My etymological dictionary (言泉) gives not only 煙草 but also 烟草, 莨, 姑烟, and 多巴古 as possible ways to write "tabako" in kanji. The bottom line, though, is that the Spanish introduced the word to Japanese in the 16th century. But at the time, the Japanese were not using katakana for foreign words at all. Instead, they did what the Chinese did: assigned kanji that conceptually fit the object. So, "smoking grass" (no pun intended).
Eventually, during the late Meiji and early Taisho, there was a tendency to write the foreign loan words in katakana instead of kanji (why I'm not sure, except to say that if you've got a phonetic system, why not use it? It wasn't an option for the Chinese). "Tabako" was one of those words, as was "biiru" (麦酒, now written ビール) and a host of other such words. The eventual switch (in the case of "tabako") to hiragana was, I think, partly a function of the age of the word in Japanese. Tobacco had been in the country for centuries, so the word for it is subsumed into the category of "native" and thus written in hiragana today.
At least, that's my take on the situation. One of the other Japanologists may actually know a historically-justified answer and set me straight!
wow, I never realized there was kanji for beer! I can't believe I didn't know that. I've never seen that used before.
Thanks for the explanation. So, when smoke (煙) and grass (草) were chosen to conceptually represent tobacco were those kanji read as "ta-ba-ko" even then? That just seems too coincidental.
Yes, they were read "tabako." This type of kanji usage has a name (wouldn't you know it): ateji (当て字). The Wikipedia entry for it seems pretty good to me--no obvious mistakes--although the English entry is much shorter than the Japanese entry so I'd recommend looking at both. The perverse nature of ateji is just so, well, perverse (from a linguistic perspective) that I can't resist putting a small unit about them into today's EAJ410 class. And, if the idea of ateji in general seems way beyond any reasonable realm, just remember that what doesn't kill us gaijin makes us stronger.
さすが先生ですね。
"beyond any reasonable realm" indeed. So, the kanji for tobacco were chosen for their meaning (smoking grass) and then instead of calling the new compound (えんそう) or whatever, it was simply renamed after the Spanish word "tabaco"? Hmm, I mean, I guess that is how Chinese operates right? What else can you do without a phonetic system in place. But, (コーヒー 珈琲) and (めちゃくちゃ 滅茶苦茶), ha, ha, ha, it's really all too much for me. I should come back and enroll in that EAJ410 class. やばい。
Just a slight diversion from the flow of the comments..
I was wondering if someone might be able to answer why so many Japanese words are written in Kanji? I understand about タバコ、but it seems to me that certain other words, like ニンジン, are never written with kanji, and I can't figure out where they might be from. Are these just more loan words, or are the kanji so obscure they go unused, or is there another explanation?
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