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Comment by Clewza313 | Hacker News Reader

> some words that are common and were originally written in kanji are now written with hiragana (such as the word "here", ここ instead of 此処).

Not really. Japanese as a spoken language predates writing systems, and words like "koko" are yamatokotoba (original Japanese), not loans from other languages. It was first written in kanji (Chinese characters) because that was the only script they had initially, hiragana and katakana came later.

To confuse things even more, 此処 is valid Chinese as well, but the pronunciation is unrelated, they just mapped the meaning on top. This is also fairly common, to the point that there's a technical term for it (jukujikun).

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You add in some interesting, additional facts, but you do not in anyway refute what the author wrote.

I think your comment would make more sense if you removed the “not really“ in the beginning. You come off as saying “No, it was not written in kanji at first. It was initially written in kanji!” Which casts a weird, negative shadow on the otherwise interesting facts you add.

It's a pretty subtle point, but the author is saying that "some words were originally written in kanji", while I'm noting that for a word like ここ, that's only true if you include the time when everything was originally written kanji. So the statement is technically correct, but IMHO rather misleading, since (the man'yogana pre-kana period aside) it's generally quite rare for word to make the leap from kanji to kana.

An even more subtle point is that kanji usage is fluid, so it's perfectly correct to write many words as kanji or kana, but with subtle shifts in meaning. For example, いい and 良い are both "good", but the latter is more formal and may even be read differently (yoi vs ii).

> An even more subtle point is that kanji usage is fluid, so it's perfectly correct to write many words as kanji or kana, but with subtle shifts in meaning. For example, いい and 良い are both "good", but the latter is more formal and may even be read differently (yoi vs ii).

Correct, and sometimes words who are otherwise written in Kanji can be written in Kana in order to put emphasis on them, similar to how we use italics in Western languages.

My experience lies on the artice author's side of this discussion.

Read some original Mishima or Dazai and they use kanji for words that modern novelists generally don't. Pick up some late Edo texts and the kaji-to-kana ratio is even greater still.

More mundanely though, if you consider typical text messages or random notes in a notebook, it's really common for words to "make the leap from kanji to kana" simply due to laziness/convenience/whatever.

> To confuse things even more, 此処 is valid Chinese as well

There's a lot more in common between the writing in Taiwan and Japan since Taiwan kept the "older" kanji while the CCP went thru the cultural revolution and the simplification of the number of strokes in each sign.

Still, there's a bunch of stuff that kind of looks like it would make sense when reading a Chinese word in Japanese, but turns out there's a lot of meanings are very different, either because the meaning evolved over time, or the Japanese simply imported kanji using their original sounds and not caring about their actual meaning.

Super interesting topic. Sometimes Japan uses the simplified version, or somewhat in between. Off the top of my head I only can think of 学/學.

There’s a handful of kanji created in Japan (called) kokuji, mostly food related. Some of these made it back to China. And there are a few differences based on simple mistakes, for example a Chinese character mistakenly applied to the wrong species of fish.

Just to add to this, simplified forms are mostly confined to Joyo kanji. The old forms do, however, exert their existence even in modern kanji as sub-pieces of (mostly rarer) other kanji---e.g. 専 used to be written 專, which still exists as the right half of 慱.

Also, there are lots of cases where the "simple" modern form doesn't really seem all that much simpler when viewing it in a typeface. My ad-hoc hypothesis is that these simplifications were considered with handrwiting in mind, e.g. 戻 (modern) vs. 戾 (original).

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai#Inconsistencies My own goto example of these inconsistencies is 臭 vs. 嗅, aggravated by the fact that Chinese fonts will have the extra stroke in 臭.

This kind of thing happens with lots of language combinations as well, when loan words or Ana logical words embed themselves locally with different semantics.

You can even see this within a language e.g. UK/USA/Australia or Portugal/Brazil.

>there's a bunch of stuff that kind of looks like it would make sense when reading a Chinese word in Japanese, but turns out there's a lot of meanings are very different

As someone who knows nothing of the Japanese language beyond the very basics, I found these videos quite entertaining:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E6vHCT0wpw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzJqXd-1dEU

It looks like many characters are familiar to his respondents, but their combinations make absolutely no sense.

Hmm many respondents made fairly good guess to the actual meaning though

> 此処 is valid Chinese as well

No. In Chinese it's 此处 (simplified Chinese) or 此處 (traditional Chinese).

AFAIK, 処 is simplified Japanese. The original kanji is 處, which is the same as traditional Chinese.

Interesting; that shares structure with 虚. That also has some nuances of place reference.

Answer of the author of the article : I will double check about 此処 now, although I am pretty sure I ran into it when I read some books from the beginning of 20th century for my research. But I definitely still see 何処 written a lot, standing for どこ. I even saw it again today in a musical show of the 1990s!

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