Chapter 3 Asian Language Overview

A phonetic writing system, such as English, consists of a collection of phonetic letters to represent a word or idea. Asian languages, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, however, use symbols or ideographs to represent words and ideas.

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ideographs are all derived from the Chinese ideographic system, numbered in the tens of thousands. Collectively, the ideographs are called han characters and are referred to as hanzi in Chinese, kanji in Japanese, and hanja in Korean.

Note that an ideograph may be pronounced in several ways, depending on the context. As well, two different ideographs may be identically pronounced. The Solaris operating environment has been designed to include support for contextual ideographs in Asian-language writing systems.

3.1 Chinese

Two Chinese writing systems are used today--Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese. Their ideographs originated in China thousands of years ago.

Used in the Republic of China (Taiwan), Traditional Chinese has approximately 50,000 characters. Many of the older and more complex characters are still used today. Figure 3-1 shows Traditional Chinese characters representing the word "China."

Figure 3-1 Traditional Chinese character representing the word "China"

Used in the People's Republic of China (PRC), Simplified Chinese is a subset of the characters in Traditional Chinese. In 1955, the PRC government started eliminating and simplifying some ideographs by reducing the number of strokes needed to render a character. The Simplified Chinese character set is now simpler and smaller. Figure shows Simplified Chinese characters representing the word "China."

Figure 3-2 Simplified Chinese character representing the word "China"

3.2 Japanese

The Japanese language uses a combination of four different writing systems--kanji characters, hiragana, katakana, and the Roman alphabet phonetic system romaji.

Kanji characters are derived from Traditional Chinese characters and are often found in combination with hiragana, katakana, and romaji.

Hiragana is a set of 83 symbols, called a syllabary, that encompasses all the basic syllables used for Japanese pronunciation. In written Japanese, the hiragana syllabary expresses grammatical parts of speech, verb tenses, and some words for which there are no kanji characters or have become obsolete.

Katakana is another phonetic syllabary consisting of a different set of symbols for the same sounds expressed in hiragana. The syllables represented by hiragana and katakana are generically called kana. Figure 3-3 shows the differences between hiragana, katakana, and kanji characters.

Romaji is used to write Japanese sounds with Roman letters. Romaji characters are usually displayed in double-width format.

Figure 3-3 The differences between hiragana, katakana, and kanji characters

3.3 Korean

The Korean language uses a combination of two different writing systems--hanja characters and hangul characters.

Hanja characters are derived from Traditional Chinese characters and are often used for formal written communication and proper names. An example of hanja is shown in Figure 3-4.

Figure 3-4 Hanja characters

Hangul characters are formed by combining one or more consonant and vowel signs from a syllabary consisting of 24 basic elements called jamos. There are approximately 11,000 hangul characters. An example of hangul is shown in Figure 3-5.

Figure 3-5 Hangul characters