174

CHINESE CHARACTERS THROUGH SIMPLIFICATION AS A JAPANESE STRATEGY

XUEXIN LIU

SPELMAN COLLEGE

Introduction: Beyond linguistic borrowing[1]

‘Linguistic borrowing’ is generally defined as transference of linguistic elements from one language into another, and it has been recognized as a universal linguistic phenomenon. Whenever a speech community incorporates some linguistic element into its contemporary language, linguistic borrowing occurs. Such a phenomenon has been long studied by scholars in various fields of linguistics, such as sociolinguistics, contact linguistics, anthropological linguistics and historical linguistics (e.g., Haugen 1972; Weinreich 1979; Poplack, Sankoff & Miller 1988). As most frequently observed in all studies of linguistic borrowing, linguistic transferences are most common in the realm of vocabulary, and this type of borrowing is specifically referred to as ‘lexical borrowing’.[2] As the term suggests, the borrowing language may incorporate some cultural item or idea and the name with it from some external source, that is, from some other language, to meet its lexical-conceptual needs. As a linguistic principle, when lexical items are borrowed, they are generally made to conform to the existing structural configurations of the borrowing language, including phonological structure, morphological structure, syntactic structure, and semantic structure. In addition to sociolinguistic and sociocultural motivations for lexical borrowing, one of the most significant findings of the previous studies is that lexical borrowing is one of the primary forces behind changes in the lexicon of many languages (cf. Romaine 1995; Myers-Scotton 2002).

Although there have been numerous studies of lexical borrowing involving various borrowing languages and source languages, there have been few studies which have investigated and explored the idiosyncratic nature of Japanese[3] in relation to its borrowing of Chinese characters. This paper specifically describes and explains the effects of Chinese characters borrowed into Japanese through some necessary morphological change (i.e., change in word form) and semantic shift or modification (i.e., change in word meaning). In order to do so, it introduces a comparative study of simplification of Chinese characters in Japan and China with a focus on the Japanese linguistic and sociolinguistic motivations for such a particular linguistic strategy.[4] Accordingly, this paper discusses several specific questions: What makes Japanese lexical borrowing of Chinese characters different from the traditional notion of lexical borrowing? What are the particular motivations for simplifying Chinese characters in Japan and China? What are the orthographic effects of simplified traditional Chinese characters in contemporary Japanese? What are the most important implications of the Japanese simplification of Chinese characters for understanding linguistic borrowing in general and lexical borrowing in particular? To answer these questions, some representative orthographic records are cited as linguistic evidence, the findings and assumptions through the comparative study will be presented, and some tentative implications will be offered.

As also observed, some Chinese characters once borrowed into the Japanese language (i.e., Japanese kanji) show some semantic shift or semantic change (i.e., certain borrowed Chinese characters no longer contain their original lexical content as in Chinese but carry different meaning).[5] This becomes an issue of the relationship between lexical borrowing and semantic shift or semantic change. In addition, a few wasei kanji/kokuji, such as 峠、働、榊、畑、and 辻, though they look like Chinese characters, were actually made in Japan. Furthermore, since Meiji period, many Japanese kango were created through word combination, such as 衛星、科学、銀行、弁当、寿司、人気、写真、and 物語 or through translation of Western documents to fit its culture and modernization needs, and such newly formulated phrases now appear in Chinese as its recently borrowed lexical items (cf. Chen 1999; Zhou 2003). Such linguistic phenomena involving lexical borrowing, lexical shift or creation, and new word formation need to be explored and described systematically; however, these topics are beyond the scope of the main interest and focus of this paper.

Kanji as a component of the Japanese linguistic system

Different from most languages in the world, Japanese has its own peculiar componential linguistic system, and different from most types of and motivations for linguistic borrowing, Japanese borrows linguistic elements from other languages for its special reasons. All this is determined by the componential nature of the Japanese language itself. Japanese consists of three distinctive but related components: hiragana, katakana, and kanji, each of which plays its special role in the Japanese linguistic system (cf. Kindaichi 1978; Nakama 2000; Yokoso 1998). Let us take a brief look at each of these components and its role in structuring the Japanese language.

Hiragana is a Japanese syllabary, one of the components of the Japanese writing system. Along with the other two components, katakana and kanji, hiragana has its own particular forms and functions. Hiragana are used for words for which there are no kanji, including particles such as kara ‘from’ and suffixes such as ~san ‘Mr., Mrs., Miss, Ms.’ Hiragana are also used for Japanese inflectional morphology, such as verb and adjective inflections. For example, in tabemashita (食べました‘ate’), BE MA SHI TA (called okurigana) are written in hiragana. In this case, part of the root is also written in hiragana. In addition, hiragana are used in words for which their kanji form is not known to the writer, is not expected to be known to the reader or is too formal for the writing purpose. Furthermore, hiragana are used to give the pronunciation of kanji in a reading aid called furigana. For example, 日本語 ‘Japanese language’ is given ‘にほんご’ as the reading aid (cf. Makino, Hasata & Hasata 1998; Tohsaku 1994).

Katakana is also a Japanese syllabary, another component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana and kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet. The word ‘katakana’ means ‘fragmentary kana’, as they are derived from components of more complex kanji. In modern Japanese, katakana are most often used for transcription of borrowed lexical items from foreign languages, called gairaigo (cf. Makino, Hasata & Hasata 1998; Tohsaku 1994). For example, ‘television’ is written テレビ. In a similar way, katakana are usually used in writing country names, foreign places, and personal names. For example, ‘Canada’ is written カナダ, ‘Atlanta’ is アトランタ, and ‘John’ is written ジョン. In addition, katakana are used for technical and scientific terms, proper names, loanwords, and so on. Katakana are also used instead of hiragana to give the pronunciation of a word written in Roman characters, or for a foreign word, which is written as kanji for the meaning, but intended to be pronounced as the original. It is very common to write words with difficult-to-read kanji in katakana in modern Japanese. To put it simple, katakana are used mainly for all such transcription purposes.

Kanji,[6] which literally means ‘Han characters’, are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system along with hiragana, katakana, and the Arabic numerals. Unlike the most commonly observed phenomena of lexical borrowing, Chinese characters were actually ‘introduced’ to Japan. Classical Chinese characters first came to Japan on articles imported from China. One instance of such an import was a gold seal given by the emperor of the Eastern Han Dynasty in 57 AD. At the time the Japanese language itself had no written form. It has not been documented when Japanese people started to command Classical Chinese by themselves. What is known is that approximately from the 6th century onwards, Chinese documents written in Japan tended to show interferences from Japanese. This suggests the wide acceptance of Chinese characters in Japan (cf. Makino, Hasata & Hasata 1998; Tohsaku 1994).

In modern Japanese, kanji has become a significant component of the Japanese linguistic system. While kanji are essentially Chinese hanzi used to write Japanese, they have gone through some significant Japanese local developments, including difference between kanji and hanzi, the use of characters created in Japan, characters that have been given different meanings in Japanese, and post World War II simplifications of the kanji.[7]

It should be clear that the three components of the Japanese language are distinctive but related, each of which plays its designated role in the Japanese writing system. While hiragana are used to write inflected verb and adjective endings, particles, native Japanese words, and words where the kanji is too difficult to read or remember; katakana are used for most if not all foreign loanwords; kanji are used to write parts of the language such as nouns, adjective stems and verb stems. Different from the traditional notion of lexical borrowing, Chinese characters ‘borrowed’ into Japanese are not simply for the so-called lexical-conceptual purpose but for the linguistic needs of the Japanese language itself. In other words, Chinese characters, whether they have gone through Japanese local developments or not, have become a fundamental component of the language (Seeley 1995).

Motivations for simplifying Chinese characters in Japan and China

Any language reform in any society is driven by particular motivations of a speech community, and such motivations may be linguistic, social, cultural or educational. There must be various factors involved in any language reform. One of the most important factors must be the government’s language policy and planning. It is in this sense that we say all language reforms are intentional, well planned, and highly regulated in order for the society to establish a relatively standard and stable linguistic system. For particular purposes and needs, language reform in a particular society can be gradual or drastic.[8] Both Japan and China have witnessed some significant language reforms for some similar but not same purposes. The simplification of traditional Chinese characters (often also called ‘classical’, ‘complex’ or ‘non-simplified’ Chinese characters) in Japan and China, to whatever extent it may be (i.e., partial or complete), can be recognized as a typical example of highly motivated and drastic language reforms. This paper assumes that the effects of any language reform are the outcomes caused by particular motivations. Below is a brief review of motivations for simplifying Chinese characters in Japan and China. Their respective effects are introduced in the next section. Let us first take a look at the complexity of Chinese characters.

Most Chinese characters during the initial phase are logographic signs, indicating both the sound and meaning of the morphemes they represent. In the literature of traditional Chinese philology, these characters fall into three major groups according to the principles underlying their graphic structure: ‘pictographic’ (xiàngxíng), ‘ideographic’ (zhĭshì), and ‘compound indicative’ (huìyì). Pictographic characters bear a physical resemblance to the objects they indicate. For example, characters like 日rì ‘sun’, 月yuè ‘moon’, 山shān ‘hill’ and 水shuĭ ‘water’ are pictographic. Supplementary to pictographic characters are idiographic ones, for which a more diagrammatic method is used to represent more abstract concepts. For example, 上shàng ‘up’ and 下xià ‘down’ are such idiographic characters. To make characters more complicated are compound indicative ones, which combine graphs of pictographic and ideographic characters based on their semantics to create new characters that imply a combination of the meanings of the component parts. For example, 从cóng ‘follow’ is made of two 人rén ‘person, with one after the other (Norman 1988; Chen 1999).

As introduced in the preceding section, kanji, since its introduction to Japan, has become one of the indispensible components of the Japanese language, playing its designated role together with the other two components in the Japanese writing system. Different from hiragana and katakana, kanji writing contains a very complex orthographic system. The complexity of kanji writing is obviously created by the peculiar nature of Chinese scripts, especially traditional classical Chinese scripts. Chinese characters (kanji) introduced to the Japanese language turned out to be too difficult to read and write or remember. In order to read and write anything more than the simplest and most basic text, one needed sufficient knowledge of many thousands of Chinese characters. In order to make the writing system of kanji less complicated in Japanese everyday life, especially in popular education, publication, and documentation, in 1946, following World War II, the Japanese government instituted a series of orthographic reforms, which were carried out in several targeted areas. First, the Chinese characters in Japanese were selectively given simplified glyphs (i.e., orthographic simplification), called 新字体 shinjitai (new character form) (cf. Kobayashi 1989; Takebe 1979).[9] Second, the number of characters in circulation was reduced, and formal lists of characters to be learned during each grade of school were established. Third, many variant forms of characters and obscure alternatives for common characters were officially discouraged. All this was done with the goal of facilitating learning for children and simplifying kanji use in literature and periodicals. Compared to Chinese, the Japanese reform was more directed, affecting only a few hundred characters and replacing them with simplified forms, most of which were already in use in Japanese cursive script. What should be noticed is that the当用漢字 Tōyōkanji were officially declared by the Japanese Ministry of Education in 1946, and the list of 1850 characters were published in 1949, including approximately 500 simplified characters, among which some were adopted directly from the Chinese simplified characters, and others were selectively simplified in Japan. However, according to a slightly modified version of the 当用漢字 Tōyōkanji, 95 so-called new forms of characters were added and included in 常用漢字Jōyōkanji in 1981. Thus, the total number of 1945 official常用漢字Jōyōkanji, also called ‘Daily-use kanji’ or ‘Educational kanji’ and shinjitai simplifications, were established by the Japanese government in 1981 to replace the当用漢字 Tōyōkanji (cf. Kindaichi 1978; Kaiser 1991; Seeley 1995; Mitamura 1997; Yoshida 1981).

Although most of the simplified Chinese characters in use today are the result of the large scale language reform movement launched by the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the 1950s and 1960s, character simplification predates the founding of the PRC in 1949. Towards the end of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and early Republican era of China’s history, there was push towards modernization and language reform. Discussions on character simplification took place within the Nationalist Government (i.e., the Kuomintang Government) in the 1930s and 1940s, and a large number of Chinese intellectuals and writers long maintained that character simplification would help boost literacy in China. In 1935, the Nationalist Government proposed 324 simplified characters but due to opposition, they were withdrawn. It was the first time that attention was drawn to the standardization of simplified characters (cf. Norman 1988; Chen 1999; DeFrancis 2006).