In a written language , a logogram (from Ancient Greek logos 'word', and gramma 'that which is drawn or written'), also logograph or lexigraph , is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme . Chinese characters as used in Chinese as well as other languages are logograms, as are Egyptian hieroglyphs and characters in cuneiform script . A writing system that primarily uses logograms is called a logography . Non-logographic writing systems, such as alphabets and syllabaries , are phonemic : their individual symbols represent sounds directly and lack any inherent meaning. However, all known logographies have some phonetic component, generally based on the rebus principle , and the addition of a phonetic component to pure ideographs is considered to be a key innovation in enabling the writing system to adequately encode human language.
89-791: Shigematsu is a Japanese name . It may refer to: People [ edit ] Surname [ edit ] Kentaro Shigematsu ( 重松 健太郎 , born 1991) , football player Kiyoshi Shigematsu ( 重松 清 , born 1963) , Japanese writer Morio Shigematsu ( 重松 森雄 , born 1940) , Japanese long-distance runner Naoki Shigematsu ( 重松 直樹 , born 1977) , Japanese former figure skater Sōiku Shigematsu ( 重松 宗育 , born 1943) , Japanese priest Takako Shigematsu ( しげまつ 貴子 ) , Japanese manga artist Tetsuro Shigematsu (born 1971), radio broadcaster Yoshinori Shigematsu ( 重松 良典 , born 1930) , Japanese football player Given name [ edit ] Shigematsu Sakaibara ( 酒井原 繁松 , 1898 – 1947) , Japanese admiral in
178-434: A Japanese name a very difficult problem. For this reason, business cards often include the pronunciation of the name as furigana , and forms and documents often include spaces to write the reading of the name in kana (usually katakana). A few Japanese names, particularly family names, include archaic versions of characters . For example, the very common character shima , "island", may be written as 嶋 or 嶌 instead of
267-455: A Japanese name, are able to choose which pronunciations they want for certain kanji, the same written form of a name may have multiple readings. In exceptional cases, this makes it impossible to determine the intended pronunciation of a name with certainty. Even so, most pronunciations chosen for names are common, making them easier to read. While any jōyō kanji (with some exceptions for readability) and jinmeiyō kanji may be used as part of
356-558: A career overseas. Yoko Ono , for example, was born in Japan, with the name 小野 洋子 , and spent the first twenty years of her life there. However, having lived outside the country for more than fifty years, and basing her career in the United States, Ono is often referred to in the press as オノ・ヨーコ , preserving the Japanese order of her name (Ono Yōko), but rendering it in katakana. Another example
445-485: A different final kanji is also common), Udō , Etō , Endō , Gotō , Jitō, Katō , Kitō , Kudō , Kondō , Saitō , Satō , Shindō , Sudō, Naitō , Bitō, and Mutō . As already noted, some of the most common family names are in this list. Japanese family names usually include characters referring to places and geographic features. Given names are called the "name" ( 名 , mei ) or "lower name" ( 下の名前 , shita no namae ) , because, in vertically written Japanese,
534-449: A disadvantage for processing homophones in English. The processing disadvantage in English is usually described in terms of the relative lack of homophones in the English language. When a homophonic word is encountered, the phonological representation of that word is first activated. However, since this is an ambiguous stimulus, a matching at the orthographic/lexical ("mental dictionary") level
623-422: A disadvantage in processing, as has been the case with English homophones, but found no evidence for this. It is evident that there is a difference in how homophones are processed in logographically coded and alphabetically coded languages, but whether the advantage for processing of homophones in the logographically coded languages Japanese and Chinese (i.e. their writing systems) is due to the logographic nature of
712-506: A fixed combination of a radical that indicates its nominal category, plus a phonetic to give an idea of the pronunciation. The Mayan system used logograms with phonetic complements like the Egyptian, while lacking ideographic components. Chinese scholars have traditionally classified the Chinese characters ( hànzì ) into six types by etymology. The first two types are "single-body", meaning that
801-414: A given individual. The character 一 when used as a male given name may be used as the written form for "Hajime", "Hitoshi", "Ichi-/-ichi" "Kazu-/-kazu", and many others. The name Hajime may be written with any of the following: 始 , 治 , 初 , 一 , 元 , 肇 , 創 , 甫 , 基 , 哉 , 啓 , 本 , 源 , 東 , 大 , 孟 , or 祝 . This many-to-many correspondence between names and the ways they are written
890-533: A long vowel, resulting in Hanachan, Hanchan, and Hāchan. The segmental content is usually a left substring of that of the given name. However, in some cases it is obtained by other means, including the use of another reading of the kanji used to write the name. For example, a girl named Megumi may be called Keichan or just Kei, because the character used to write Megumi ( 恵 ) , can also be read Kei . The common Japanese practice of forming abbreviations by concatenating
979-474: A massive public outcry. Though there are regulations on the naming of children, many archaic characters can still be found in adults' names, particularly those born prior to the Second World War . Because the legal restrictions on use of such kanji cause inconvenience for those with such names and promote a proliferation of identical names, many recent changes have been made to increase rather than to reduce
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#17329062256751068-502: A measure of politeness. When children are born into the Imperial family, they receive a standard given name as well as a special title. For instance, the Emperor emeritus Akihito was born Tsugu-no-miya Akihito ( 継宮明仁 ) . In this name, the title is Tsugu-no-miya ( 継宮 , "Prince Tsugu") , and he was referred to as "Prince Tsugu" during his childhood. This title is generally used until
1157-529: A mixture of kanji and kana . While most "traditional" names use kun'yomi (native Japanese) kanji readings, a large number of given names and surnames use on'yomi (Chinese-based) kanji readings as well. Many others use readings which are only used in names ( nanori ), such as the female name Nozomi ( 希 ) . The sound no , indicating possession (like the Saxon genitive in English), and corresponding to
1246-478: A name is Saitō : there are two common kanji for sai here. The two sai characters have different meanings: 斉 means "together" or "parallel", but 斎 means "to purify". These names can also exist written in archaic forms, as 齊藤 and 齋藤 respectively. A problem occurs when an elderly person forgets how to write their name in old kanji that is no longer used. Family names are sometimes written with periphrastic readings, called jukujikun , in which
1335-417: A name, names may be rejected if they are believed to fall outside what would be considered an acceptable name by measures of common sense. Japanese names may be written in hiragana or katakana , the Japanese language syllabaries for words of Japanese or foreign origin, respectively. As such, names written in hiragana or katakana are phonetic rendering and lack meanings that are expressed by names written in
1424-744: A particular expectation of her. Names ending with -ko dropped significantly in popularity in the mid-1980s, but are still given, though much less than in the past. Male names occasionally end with the syllable -ko as in Mako , but very rarely using the kanji 子 (most often, if a male name ends in -ko , it ends in -hiko , using the kanji 彦 meaning "boy"). Common male name endings are -shi and -o ; names ending with -shi are often adjectives, e.g., Atsushi, which might mean, for example, "(to be) faithful." Katakana and hiragana spellings are characteristic of feminine names rather than masculine names, with katakana often used for women's names in
1513-604: A picture of an elephant, which is pronounced zou in Japanese, before being presented with the Chinese character 造 , which is also read zou . No effect of phonologically related context pictures were found for the reaction times for reading Chinese words. A comparison of the (partially) logographically coded languages Japanese and Chinese is interesting because whereas the Japanese language consists of more than 60% homographic heterophones (characters that can be read two or more different ways), most Chinese characters only have one reading. Because both languages are logographically coded,
1602-458: A practical limitation in the number of input keys. There exist various input methods for entering logograms, either by breaking them up into their constituent parts such as with the Cangjie and Wubi methods of typing Chinese, or using phonetic systems such as Bopomofo or Pinyin where the word is entered as pronounced and then selected from a list of logograms matching it. While the former method
1691-429: A recent reconstruction by William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart – but sound changes in the intervening 3,000 years or so (including two different dialectal developments, in the case of the last two characters) have resulted in radically different pronunciations. Within the context of the Chinese language, Chinese characters (known as hanzi ) by and large represent words and morphemes rather than pure ideas; however,
1780-460: A relatively robust immunity to the effect of context stimuli, Verdschot et al. found that Japanese homophones seem particularly sensitive to these types of effects. Specifically, reaction times were shorter when participants were presented with a phonologically related picture before being asked to read a target character out loud. An example of a phonologically related stimulus from the study would be for instance when participants were presented with
1869-429: A semantic/ideographic component (see ideogram ), called "determinatives" in the case of Egyptian and "radicals" in the case of Chinese. Typical Egyptian usage was to augment a logogram, which may potentially represent several words with different pronunciations, with a determinate to narrow down the meaning, and a phonetic component to specify the pronunciation. In the case of Chinese, the vast majority of characters are
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#17329062256751958-537: A significant extent in writing even if they do not write in Standard Chinese . Therefore, in China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan before modern times, communication by writing ( 筆談 ) was the norm of East Asian international trade and diplomacy using Classical Chinese . This separation, however, also has the great disadvantage of requiring the memorization of the logograms when learning to read and write, separately from
2047-416: A space in given names (to separate first and middle names) is not allowed in official documents, because technically, a space is not an allowed character. However, spaces are sometimes used on business cards and in correspondence. Historically, families consisted of many children and it was a common practice to name sons by numbers suffixed with rō ( 郎 , "son") . The first son would be known as "Ichirō",
2136-866: A two-million-word sample. As for the case of traditional Chinese characters, 4,808 characters are listed in the " Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters " ( 常用國字標準字體表 ) by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China , while 4,759 in the " List of Graphemes of Commonly-Used Chinese Characters " ( 常用字字形表 ) by the Education and Manpower Bureau of Hong Kong , both of which are intended to be taught during elementary and junior secondary education. Education after elementary school includes not as many new characters as new words, which are mostly combinations of two or more already learned characters. Entering complex characters can be cumbersome on electronic devices due to
2225-425: Is Petoro ( ペトロ ) , John is Yohane ( ヨハネ ) , Jacob is Yakobu ( ヤコブ ) , Martin is Maruchino ( マルチノ ) , Dominic is Dominiko ( ドミニコ ) , and so on. For most purposes in real life, Christian names are not used; for example, Taro Aso has a Christian name, Francisco ( フランシスコ , Furanshisuko ) , which is not nearly as well-known. 16th century kirishitan daimyō Dom Justo Takayama , on
2314-407: Is Finnish , is a famous example. Others transliterate their names into phonetically similar kanji compounds, such as activist Arudou Debito ( 有道 出人 ) , an American-Japanese activist known as 'David Aldwinckle' before taking Japanese citizenship. (Tsurunen has similarly adopted 弦念 丸呈 .) Still others have abandoned their native names entirely in favor of Yamato names, such as Lafcadio Hearn (who
2403-449: Is (linearly) faster, it is more difficult to learn. With the Chinese alphabet system however, the strokes forming the logogram are typed as they are normally written, and the corresponding logogram is then entered. Also due to the number of glyphs, in programming and computing in general, more memory is needed to store each grapheme, as the character set is larger. As a comparison, ISO 8859 requires only one byte for each grapheme, while
2492-422: Is abbreviated as Jimihen ( ジミヘン ) . Some Japanese celebrities have also taken names combining kanji and katakana, such as Terry Ito ( テリー伊藤 ) . Another slightly less common method is doubling one or two syllables of the person's name, such as the use of "MamiMami" for Mamiko Noto . Many ethnic minorities living in Japan, mostly Korean and Chinese, adopt Japanese names. The roots of this custom go back to
2581-584: Is an example of an alphabetic script that was designed to replace the logogrammatic hanja in order to increase literacy. The latter is now rarely used, but retains some currency in South Korea, sometimes in combination with hangul. According to government-commissioned research, the most commonly used 3,500 characters listed in the People's Republic of China 's " Chart of Common Characters of Modern Chinese " ( 现代汉语常用字表 , Xiàndài Hànyǔ Chángyòngzì Biǎo ) cover 99.48% of
2670-595: Is considered a social superior by their title. Similarly to Western cultures, one would not address their mother by their name, but perhaps as okāsan ( お母さん , "mother") ; however, this readily extends outside the family circle as well. A teacher would be addressed as sensei ( 先生 , "teacher") , while a company president would be addressed as shachō ( 社長 , "company president") . Pronouns meaning "you" ( anata ( あなた ) , kimi ( きみ ) , omae ( お前 ) ) are uncommon in Japanese, as when used improperly they may be perceived as being affrontive or sarcastic. It
2759-443: Is different from Wikidata All set index articles Japanese name Japanese names ( 日本人の氏名、日本人の姓名、日本人の名前 , Nihonjin no shimei, Nihonjin no seimei, Nihonjin no namae ) in modern times consist of a family name (surname) followed by a given name . Japanese names are usually written in kanji , where the pronunciation follows a special set of rules. Because parents when naming children, and foreigners when adopting
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2848-503: Is more common for people to address each other by name/title and honorific, even in face-to-face conversations. Any given name corresponds with one or more hypocoristics , or affectionate nicknames. These are formed by adding the suffix -chan ( ちゃん ) to a name stem. There are two types of stem: the full given name or a modified stem derived from the full given name. Examples of the first type are Tarō-chan from Tarō, Kimiko-chan from Kimiko, and Yasunari-chan from Yasunari. Examples of
2937-415: Is much more common with male given names than with surnames or female given names but can be observed in all these categories. The permutations of potential characters and sounds can become enormous, as some very overloaded sounds may be produced by over 500 distinct kanji and some kanji characters can stand for several dozen sounds. This can and does make the collation , pronunciation , and romanization of
3026-471: Is necessary before the stimulus can be disambiguated, and the correct pronunciation can be chosen. In contrast, in a language (such as Chinese) where many characters with the same reading exists, it is hypothesized that the person reading the character will be more familiar with homophones, and that this familiarity will aid the processing of the character, and the subsequent selection of the correct pronunciation, leading to shorter reaction times when attending to
3115-483: Is read Takanashi , because little birds ( kotori ) play ( asobi ) where there are no ( nashi ) hawks ( taka ). Most Japanese people and agencies have adopted customs to deal with these issues. Address books , for instance, often contain furigana or ruby characters to clarify the pronunciation of the name. Japanese nationals are also required to give a romanized name for their passport . Not all names are complicated. Some common names are summarized by
3204-424: Is referred to as Erikku Shinseki ( エリック シンセキ ) . However, sometimes Japanese parents decide to use Japanese order when mentioning the child's name in Japanese. Also, Japanese parents tend to give their children a name in kanji, hiragana, or katakana, particularly if it is a Japanese name. Even individuals born in Japan, with a Japanese name, might be referred to using katakana if they have established residency or
3293-596: Is the inventor of Bitcoin , who has gone under the name Satoshi Nakamoto , and which is most likely a pseudonym, perhaps even of a non-Japanese person; Nakamoto is referred to in Japanese with katakana in Western order, サトシ・ナカモト , rather than 中本聡 . Christians in Japan traditionally have Christian names in addition to their native Japanese names. These Christian names are written using katakana, and are adapted to Japanese phonology from their Portuguese or Latin forms rather than being borrowed from English. Peter, for example,
3382-670: Is the surname and which is the given name is usually apparent, no matter in which order the names are presented. It is thus unlikely that the two names will be confused, for example, when writing in English while using the family name-given name naming order. However, due to the variety of pronunciations and differences in languages, some common surnames and given names may coincide when Romanized: e.g., Maki ( 真紀、麻紀、真樹 ) (given name) and Maki ( 真木、槇、牧 ) (surname). The term surname or family name can translate into three different Japanese words, myōji ( 苗字 ) , uji ( 氏 ) , and sei ( 姓 ) , which historically had different meanings. Sei ( 姓 )
3471-488: Is the unit of which a light syllable contains one and a heavy syllable two. For example, the stems that may be derived from Tarō are /taro/, consisting of two light syllables, and /taa/, consisting of a single syllable with a long vowel, resulting in Taro-chan and Tā-chan. The stems that may be derived from Hanako are /hana/, with two light syllables, /han/, with one syllable closed by a consonant, and /haa/, with one syllable with
3560-407: Is typically added. Calling someone's name (family name) without any title or honorific is called yobisute ( 呼び捨て ) , and may be considered rude even in the most informal and friendly occasions. This faux pas , however, is readily excused for foreigners. Japanese people often avoid referring to their seniors or superiors by name at all. Rather, it is considered more respectful to address one who
3649-519: Is used for their phonetic values, either consonantal or syllabic. The term logosyllabary is used to emphasize the partially phonetic nature of these scripts when the phonetic domain is the syllable. In Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs , Ch'olti', and in Chinese, there has been the additional development of determinatives , which are combined with logograms to narrow down their possible meaning. In Chinese, they are fused with logographic elements used phonetically; such " radical and phonetic" characters make up
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3738-505: The on'yomi tō (or, with rendaku , dō ). Many Japanese people have surnames that include this kanji as the second character. This is because the Fujiwara clan ( 藤原家 ) gave their samurai surnames ( myōji ) ending with the first character of their name (which can be pronounced either fuji or tō ), to denote their status in an era when commoners were not allowed surnames. Examples include Atō, Andō , Itō (although
3827-534: The Arab conquest of Persia and the adoption of a variant of the Arabic alphabet . All historical logographic systems include a phonetic dimension, as it is impractical to have a separate basic character for every word or morpheme in a language. In some cases, such as cuneiform as it was used for Akkadian, the vast majority of glyphs are used for their sound values rather than logographically. Many logographic systems also have
3916-526: The Basic Multilingual Plane encoded in UTF-8 requires up to three bytes. On the other hand, English words, for example, average five characters and a space per word and thus need six bytes for every word. Since many logograms contain more than one grapheme, it is not clear which is more memory-efficient. Variable-width encodings allow a unified character encoding standard such as Unicode to use only
4005-558: The Muromachi period . Japanese peasants had surnames in the Edo period ; however, they could not use them in public. Most surnames are written with two kanji characters, but some common surnames are written with one or three kanji. Some surnames written with four or five kanji exist, such as Kadenokōji ( 勘解由小路 ) , but these are rare. One large category of family names can be categorized as -tō names. The kanji 藤 , meaning wisteria , has
4094-541: The logographic kanji. The majority of Japanese people have one surname and one given name, except for the Japanese imperial family , whose members have no surname. The family name precedes the given name. People with mixed Japanese and foreign parentage may have middle names. Very few names are in use both as surnames and as given names (for example Mayumi ( 真弓 ) , Izumi ( 泉 ) , Masuko ( 益子 ) , or Arata ( 新 ) ). Therefore, to those familiar with Japanese names, which name
4183-444: The 1870s, when the Japanese government created the new family registration system. Logogram Logographic systems include the earliest writing systems; the first historical civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica used some form of logographic writing. All logographic scripts ever used for natural languages rely on the rebus principle to extend a relatively limited set of logograms: A subset of characters
4272-709: The Imperial Japanese Navy [REDACTED] Name list This page or section lists people that share the same given name or the same family name . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change that link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shigematsu&oldid=1159986365 " Categories : Given names Surnames Japanese-language surnames Japanese masculine given names Masculine given names Hidden categories: Articles containing Japanese-language text Articles with short description Short description
4361-484: The Old Chinese difference between type-A and type-B syllables (often described as presence vs. absence of palatalization or pharyngealization ); and sometimes, voicing of initial obstruents and/or the presence of a medial /r/ after the initial consonant. In earlier times, greater phonetic freedom was generally allowed. During Middle Chinese times, newly created characters tended to match pronunciation exactly, other than
4450-494: The adoption of Chinese characters by the Japanese and Korean languages (where they are known as kanji and hanja , respectively) have resulted in some complications to this picture. Many Chinese words, composed of Chinese morphemes, were borrowed into Japanese and Korean together with their character representations; in this case, the morphemes and characters were borrowed together. In other cases, however, characters were borrowed to represent native Japanese and Korean morphemes, on
4539-436: The basis of meaning alone. As a result, a single character can end up representing multiple morphemes of similar meaning but with different origins across several languages. Because of this, kanji and hanja are sometimes described as morphographic writing systems. Because much research on language processing has centered on English and other alphabetically written languages, many theories of language processing have stressed
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#17329062256754628-423: The bulk of the script. Ancient Egyptian and Chinese relegated the active use of rebus to the spelling of foreign and dialectical words. Logoconsonantal scripts have graphemes that may be extended phonetically according to the consonants of the words they represent, ignoring the vowels. For example, Egyptian was used to write both sȝ 'duck' and sȝ 'son', though it is likely that these words were not pronounced
4717-555: The character の , is often included in names but not written as a separate character, as in the common name i-no-ue ( 井上 , well-(possessive)-top/above, top of the well) , or historical figures such as Sen no Rikyū . A name written in kanji may have more than one common pronunciation, only one of which is correct for a given individual. For example, the surname written in kanji as 東海林 may be read either Tōkairin or Shōji . Conversely, any one name may have several possible written forms, and again, only one will be correct for
4806-400: The character was created independently of other characters. "Single-body" pictograms and ideograms make up only a small proportion of Chinese logograms. More productive for the Chinese script were the two "compound" methods, i.e. the character was created from assembling different characters. Despite being called "compounds", these logograms are still single characters, and are written to take up
4895-478: The characters in their names because not all characters are legally recognized in Japan for naming purposes. Japanese citizenship used to require adoption of a Japanese name. In recent decades, the government has allowed individuals to simply adopt katakana versions of their native names when applying for citizenship, as is already done when referring to non-East Asian foreigners: National Diet member Tsurunen Marutei ( ツルネン マルテイ ) , originally 'Martti Turunen', who
4984-668: The colonial-era policy of sōshi-kaimei , which forced Koreans to change their names to Japanese names. Nowadays, ethnic minorities, mostly Korean, who immigrated to Japan after WWII take on Japanese names (sometimes called 'pass names') to ease communication and, more importantly, to avoid discrimination . A few of them (e.g., Han Chang-Woo , founder and chairman of Maruhan Corp., pronounced 'Kan Shōyū' in Japanese) still keep their native names. Sometimes, however, ethnic Chinese and Koreans in Japan who choose to renounce Permanent Resident status to apply for Japanese citizenship have to change
5073-403: The correct pronunciation. This hypothesis is confirmed by studies finding that Japanese Alzheimer's disease patients whose comprehension of characters had deteriorated still could read the words out loud with no particular difficulty. Studies contrasting the processing of English and Chinese homophones in lexical decision tasks have found an advantage for homophone processing in Chinese, and
5162-444: The difference in latency in reading aloud Japanese and Chinese due to context effects cannot be ascribed to the logographic nature of the writing systems. Instead, the authors hypothesize that the difference in latency times is due to additional processing costs in Japanese, where the reader cannot rely solely on a direct orthography-to-phonology route, but information on a lexical-syntactical level must also be accessed in order to choose
5251-523: The early 20th century due to being easier to read and write. A single name-forming element, such as hiro ("expansiveness") can be written by more than one kanji ( 博 , 弘 , or 浩 ). Conversely, a particular kanji can have multiple meanings and pronunciations. In some names, Japanese characters phonetically "spell" a name and have no intended meaning behind them. Many Japanese personal names use puns. Although usually written in kanji, Japanese names have distinct differences from Chinese names through
5340-493: The extended Imperial family became commoners after World War II and adopted their princely family names minus the honorific -no-miya ( 宮 , "Prince") as regular surnames. Conversely, if a commoner or a noble were to become a member of the Imperial family, such as through marriage, their family name is lost. An example is Empress Michiko , whose name was Michiko Shōda before she married Prince Akihito . The current structure (family name + given name) did not materialize until
5429-763: The first five phases of the Bamum script . A peculiar system of logograms developed within the Pahlavi scripts (developed from the abjad of Aramaic ) used to write Middle Persian during much of the Sassanid period ; the logograms were composed of letters that spelled out the word in Aramaic but were pronounced as in Persian (for instance, the combination m-l-k would be pronounced "shah"). These logograms, called hozwārishn (a form of heterograms ), were dispensed with altogether after
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#17329062256755518-428: The first two morae of two words is sometimes applied to names (usually those of celebrities). For example, Takuya Kimura ( 木村 拓哉 , Kimura Takuya ) , a famous Japanese actor and singer, becomes Kimutaku ( キムタク ) . This is sometimes applied even to non-Japanese celebrities: Brad Pitt , whose full name in Japanese is Buraddo Pitto ( ブラッド・ピット ) is commonly known as Burapi ( ブラピ ) , and Jimi Hendrix
5607-456: The given name appears under the family name. While family names follow relatively consistent rules, given names are much more diverse in pronunciation and characters. While many common names can easily be spelled or pronounced, parents may choose names with unusual characters or pronunciations; the pronunciation of such names generally cannot be inferred from the written form, or vice versa. Unusual pronunciations have become much more common, as
5696-447: The individual becomes heir to the throne or inherits one of the historical princely family names ( Hitachi-no-miya ( 常陸宮 ) , Mikasa-no-miya ( 三笠宮 ) , Akishino-no-miya ( 秋篠宮 ) , etc.). When a member of the Imperial family becomes a noble or a commoner, the emperor gives them a family name. In medieval era, the family name " Minamoto " was often used. In modern era, princely family names are used. For example, many members of
5785-659: The majority of personal names. Kanji names in Japan are governed by the Japanese Ministry of Justice's rules on kanji use in names. As of January 2015 , only the 843 "name kanji" ( jinmeiyō kanji ) and 2,136 "commonly used characters" ( jōyō kanji ) are permitted for use in personal names. This is intended to ensure that names can be readily written and read by those literate in Japanese. Names may be rejected if they are considered unacceptable; for example, in 1993 two parents who tried to name their child Akuma ( 悪魔 ) , which means "devil", were prohibited from doing so after
5874-689: The medieval noble clans, and they trace their lineage either directly to these sei or to the courtiers of these sei . Myōji ( 苗字 ) was simply what a family chooses to call itself, as opposed to the sei granted by the emperor. While it was passed on patrilineally in male ancestors including in male ancestors called haku (uncles), one had a certain degree of freedom in changing one's myōji . See also kabane . According to estimates, there are over 300,000 different surnames in use today in Japan. The three most common family names in Japan are Satō ( 佐藤 ) , Suzuki ( 鈴木 ) , and Takahashi ( 高橋 ) . People in Japan began using surnames during
5963-436: The number of kanji allowed for use in names. The Sapporo High Court held that it was unlawful for the government to deny registration of a child's name because it contained a kanji character that was relatively common but not included in the official list of name characters compiled by the Ministry of Justice. Subsequently, the Japanese government promulgated plans to increase the number of kanji "permitted" in names. The use of
6052-460: The other hand, is far more well known by his Christian name Justo ( ジュスト ) than his birth name, Hikogorō Shigetomo. For historical reasons, the Japanese emperor and his families do not have a surname and possess only a given name, such as Hirohito ( 裕仁 ) . However, Japanese people prefer to say "the Emperor" or "the Crown Prince", rather than using the personal name out of respect and as
6141-494: The phrase tanakamura ("the village in the middle of the rice fields") : the three kanji ( ta ( 田 , "rice field") , naka ( 中 , "middle") and mura ( 村 , "village") ), together in any pair, form a simple, reasonably common surname: Tanaka , Nakamura , Murata , Nakata (Nakada), Muranaka , Tamura . Despite these difficulties, there are enough patterns and recurring names that most native Japanese will be able to read virtually all family names they encounter and
6230-463: The practical compromise of standardizing how words are written while maintaining a nearly one-to-one relation between characters and sounds. Orthographies in some other languages, such as English , French , Thai and Tibetan , are all more complicated than that; character combinations are often pronounced in multiple ways, usually depending on their history. Hangul , the Korean language 's writing system,
6319-471: The pronunciation. Though not from an inherent feature of logograms but due to its unique history of development, Japanese has the added complication that almost every logogram has more than one pronunciation. Conversely, a phonetic character set is written precisely as it is spoken, but with the disadvantage that slight pronunciation differences introduce ambiguities. Many alphabetic systems such as those of Greek , Latin , Italian , Spanish , and Finnish make
6408-535: The role of hemispheric lateralization in orthographically versus phonetically coded languages. Another topic that has been given some attention is differences in processing of homophones. Verdonschot et al. examined differences in the time it took to read a homophone out loud when a picture that was either related or unrelated to a homophonic character was presented before the character. Both Japanese and Chinese homophones were examined. Whereas word production of alphabetically coded languages (such as English) has shown
6497-903: The role of phonology in producing speech. Contrasting logographically coded languages, where a single character is represented phonetically and ideographically, with phonetically/phonemically spelled languages has yielded insights into how different languages rely on different processing mechanisms. Studies on the processing of logographically coded languages have amongst other things looked at neurobiological differences in processing, with one area of particular interest being hemispheric lateralization. Since logographically coded languages are more closely associated with images than alphabetically coded languages, several researchers have hypothesized that right-side activation should be more prominent in logographically coded languages. Although some studies have yielded results consistent with this hypothesis there are too many contrasting results to make any final conclusions about
6586-701: The same amount of space as any other logogram. The final two types are methods in the usage of characters rather than the formation of characters themselves. The most productive method of Chinese writing, the radical-phonetic, was made possible by ignoring certain distinctions in the phonetic system of syllables. In Old Chinese , post-final ending consonants /s/ and /ʔ/ were typically ignored; these developed into tones in Middle Chinese , which were likewise ignored when new characters were created. Also ignored were differences in aspiration (between aspirated vs. unaspirated obstruents , and voiced vs. unvoiced sonorants);
6675-488: The same except for their consonants. The primary examples of logoconsonantal scripts are Egyptian hieroglyphs , hieratic , and demotic : Ancient Egyptian . Logosyllabic scripts have graphemes which represent morphemes, often polysyllabic morphemes, but when extended phonetically represent single syllables. They include cuneiform, Anatolian hieroglyphs , Cretan hieroglyphs , Linear A and Linear B , Chinese characters , Maya script , Aztec script , Mixtec script , and
6764-604: The scripts, or if it merely reflects an advantage for languages with more homophones regardless of script nature, remains to be seen. The main difference between logograms and other writing systems is that the graphemes are not linked directly to their pronunciation. An advantage of this separation is that understanding of the pronunciation or language of the writer is unnecessary, e.g. 1 is understood regardless of whether it be called one , ichi or wāḥid by its reader. Likewise, people speaking different varieties of Chinese may not understand each other in speaking, but may do so to
6853-636: The second as "Jirō", and so on. Girls were often named with ko ( 子 , "child") at the end of the given name (this should not be confused with the less common male suffix hiko ( 彦 ) ). Both practices have become less common, although many children continue to be given names that originate from these conventions. Conventions of direct address and name use in conversation are heavily governed by respect for those considered in higher social positions (ex. older family members, teachers, employers), familiarity with those considered to be in lower social positions (ex. younger family members, students, employees) and
6942-402: The second type are Ta-chan from Tarō, Kii-chan from Kimiko, and Yā-chan from Yasunari. Hypocoristics with modified stems are considered more intimate than those based on the full given name. Hypocoristics with modified stems are derived by adding -chan to a stem consisting of an integral number, usually one but occasionally two, of feet , where a foot consists of two moras . A mora ( 音節 )
7031-446: The selection of characters in a name and the pronunciation of them. A Japanese person can distinguish a Japanese name from a Chinese name. Akie Tomozawa said that this was equivalent to how "Europeans can easily tell that the name 'Smith' is English and 'Schmidt' is German or that 'Victor' is English or French and 'Vittorio' is Italian". Japanese names are usually written in kanji, although some names use hiragana or even katakana , or
7120-418: The speaker's relationships with the listener and the addressee. Typically, the family name is used to refer to an individual, and personal or given names are largely restricted to informal situations and cases where the speaker is older than, a superior of, or very familiar with the named individual. When addressing someone or referring to a member of one's out-group , a respectful title such as -san ( さん )
7209-424: The stimulus. In an attempt to better understand homophony effects on processing, Hino et al. conducted a series of experiments using Japanese as their target language. While controlling for familiarity, they found a processing advantage for homophones over non-homophones in Japanese, similar to what has previously been found in Chinese. The researchers also tested whether orthographically similar homophones would yield
7298-774: The tone – often by using as the phonetic component a character that itself is a radical-phonetic compound. Due to the long period of language evolution, such component "hints" within characters as provided by the radical-phonetic compounds are sometimes useless and may be misleading in modern usage. As an example, based on 每 'each', pronounced měi in Standard Mandarin , are the characters 侮 'to humiliate', 悔 'to regret', and 海 'sea', pronounced respectively wǔ , huǐ , and hǎi in Mandarin. Three of these characters were pronounced very similarly in Old Chinese – /mˤəʔ/ (每), /m̥ˤəʔ/ (悔), and /m̥ˤəʔ/ (海) according to
7387-1320: The trend has significantly increased in popularity since the 1990s. For example, the popular masculine name 大翔 is traditionally pronounced "Hiroto", but in recent years alternative pronunciations "Haruto", " Yamato ", "Taiga", "Sora", "Taito", "Daito", and "Masato" have all entered use. Male names often end in -rō ( 郎/朗 , "son" or "clear, bright") (e.g. " Ichirō "), -ta ( 太 , "great, thick" or "first [son]") (e.g. " Kenta "), or -o ( 男/雄/夫 , "man") (e.g. "Teruo" or " Akio "). Male names often also contain ichi ( 一 , "first [son]") (e.g. " Ken'ichi "), kazu ( 一 , "first [son]") (also written with 一 , along with several other possible characters; e.g. " Kazuhiro "), ji ( 二/次 , "second [son]" or "next") (e.g. " Jirō "), or dai ( 大 , "great, large") (e.g. " Daichi "). Female names often end in -ko ( 子 , "child") (e.g. " Keiko ") or -mi ( 美 , "beauty") (e.g. " Yumi "). Other popular endings for female names include -ka ( 香/花 , "scent, perfume" or "flower") (e.g. " Reika ") and -na ( 奈/菜 , "greens" or "apple tree") (e.g. " Haruna "). Most personal names use one, two, or three kanji. Four-syllable given names are common, especially in eldest sons. The usage of -ko ( 子 ) has changed significantly over
7476-451: The usual 島 . Some names also feature very uncommon kanji, or even kanji which no longer exist in modern Japanese . Japanese people who have such names are likely to compromise by substituting similar or simplified characters. This may be difficult for input of kanji in computers, as many kanji databases on computers only include common and regularly used kanji, and many archaic or mostly unused characters are not included. An example of such
7565-489: The written characters relate indirectly to the name as spoken. For example, 四月一日 would normally be read as shigatsu tsuitachi ("April 1st") , but as a family name it is read watanuki ("unpadded clothes") , because the first day of the fourth lunar month (in the old lunar calendar, closer to 1 May) is the traditional date to switch from winter to summer clothes. In the same way 小鳥遊 would normally be read as kotori asobi ("little birds play") or shōchōyū , but
7654-508: The years: prior to the Meiji Restoration (1868), it was reserved for members of the imperial family. Following the restoration, it became popular and was overwhelmingly common in the Taishō and early Shōwa era. The suffix -ko increased in popularity after the mid-20th century. Around the year 2006, due to the citizenry mimicking naming habits of popular entertainers, the suffix -ko
7743-439: Was declining in popularity. At the same time, names of western origin, written in kana, were becoming increasingly popular for naming of girls. By 2004 there was a trend of using hiragana instead of kanji in naming girls. Molly Hakes said that this may have to do with using hiragana out of cultural pride, since hiragana is Japan's indigenous writing form, or out of not assigning a meaning to a girl's name so that others do not have
7832-507: Was half Anglo-Irish and half Greek ), who used the name Koizumi Yakumo ( 小泉 八雲 ) . At the time, to gain Japanese citizenship, it was necessary to be adopted by a Japanese family (in Hearn's case, it was his wife's family) and take their name. Individuals born overseas with Western given names and Japanese surnames are usually given a katakana name in Western order ([given name] [surname]) when referred to in Japanese. Eric Shinseki , for instance,
7921-551: Was originally the patrilineal surname which was granted by the emperor as a title of male rank. In the 8th century, eight types of sei were established, but later all surnames except for ason ( 朝臣 ) almost disappeared. Uji ( 氏 ) was another name used to designate patrilineal clan. Uji and Sei used in the set: e.g., Minamoto no Ason ( 源朝臣 ) , Taira no Ason ( 平朝臣 ) , Fujiwara no Ason ( 藤原朝臣 ) . Uji and sei together are called seishi or shōji ( 姓氏 ) and also simply sei . There were relatively few sei of
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