Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind

Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications

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THE ALPHABET Chinese, is not monosyllabic, but an agglutinative language-one must consider the following factors: (1) the great number of Chinese characters which form the basis of the Japanese scripts; (2) the fact that these characters had sometimes an ideographic, and sometimes a phonetic value; (3) the pronunciation of Chinese characters varies in the different Chinese provinces and has changed in the various historical periods; (4) the Japanese borrowed Chinese characters in different periods and from different regions; (5) nearly every Japanese word can be given either the Japanese or a Chinese pronunciation and there is no absolute rule governing the choice. It follows from a consideration of the aforementioned factors that many Japanese words have various alte pronunciations. (See Harold G. Henderson, Handbook of Japanese Grammar, London, Allen and Unwin, 1945-)
Generally speaking, Japanese characters can be pronounced in the following ways: (1) Japanese pronunciation, kun, that is, Chinese ideograms are translated into Japanese; and (2) the so-called Chinese pronunciation, on, which has little affinity with the spoken Chinese of to-day and is the pronunciation of Chinese words as they sounded to Japanese ears at the time when the characters in question were first adopted. This category can be sub-divided into three classes: (a)ga-on, the pronunciation derived from the Chinese dialect used in the third century A.D. in the realm Go (in Chinese Wu), in the Shanghai region; this pronunciation was mainly superseded by the pronunciation (6) kan-on (han), which was derived from the dialect of northern China and was introduced into Japan by Chinese priests during the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries; (c) the pronunciation to-in (T"ang), derived from a dialect in vogue between the tenth and seventeenth centuries and introduced into Japan in 1655 by the sect Obaku; this is employed almost exclusively for Buddhist texts.
Japanese Ideograms There are tens of thousands of Japanese ideograms. The average cultured Japanese can read and write correctly about two thousand symbols. A highly educated person, a university graduate, for instance, may know about seven to eight thousand symbols, but only specialists in the subject are able to read classical literary Japanese. Since 1900, Japanese educational reformers have tried to reduce the number of ideograms used in the elementary schools, but even there the minimum of characters used is about 1,200. An official communiqué issued by the "Domei" Agency on 19th June, 1942, reported that special commissions of philologists, after twenty years of research work, had decided to reduce the essential ideograms to 2,028. However, the situation at present is that every word has its own character and the reader who does not happen to know the meaning of a symbol will also be unable to pronounce it.