Originally the Japanese had no way to write the Japanese language31. Chinese characters were introduced into Japan along with Confucianism and Buddhism. The structure of a majority of Chinese characters consists of two parts. One part defines the meaning while the other part defines the pronunciation. The two parts often are so selected as to express a logical or poetic meaning for the character.
The Chinese characters are used as stems of many words. Two or more Chinese characters often are grouped together to form compound words.
The Chinese characters are called kanji by the Japanese. A character dictionary lists 5500 Chinese characters of common occurrence in the modern literature. There are many more in the classical literature. Many of the kanji have been simplified, and in November 1946 the Japanese Ministry of Education selected 1850 kanji to be used in newspapers and official documents. These are called Tōyō Kanji or current characters. They constitute much too restricted a list for technical writing, and even the abstract which is referred to above is not confined to the list.
Parts of certain Chinese characters have been abstracted by the Japanese to form two phonetic syllabaries. The phonetic characters are called kana by the Japanese. The hiragana syllabary is used as the inflection of words and the katakana syllabary is used for foreign words or telegrams. There are 48 basic characters in each phonetic syllabary. Some of these may be modified by diacritical marks or nigori to make 25 additional characters. The number of phonemes is 73 for each syllabary.
Each Chinese character has one or more pronunciations of Chinese origin which are called on. The Chinese characters for common things also have a Japanese pronunciation which is called kun. When Chinese characters are used individually or with a Japanese inflection they are given the kun pronunciation. When they are joined together in a compound word they are given the on pronunciation. There are only 326 on pronunciations to be distributed among 5500 characters. Each
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