ABSTRACT
A note from Ken Goodman: This chapter examines how and why orthographies take the forms they do and how they illustrate the ingenuity which people have used in creating orthographies to fit the needs of their culture. In this particular case, Mieko Iventosch discusses the history of Japanese by demonstrating how Chinese characters (called kanji in Japanese) were adapted to use in Japanese and how the derived syllabic systems and kanji are all combined in writing modern Japanese. This story makes the Japanese writing system seemingly complex. Yet it is common for Japanese children to arrive at school already reading.
Alphabetic letters are phonograms and kanji are ideograms. (English)
寫字母是表音文字，漢字是表意文字。 (Chinese)
アルファベットは表音文字で、漢字は表意文字である。 (Japanese)
