March 07, 2004
Chinese Characters Don't All Come From China
Since Mark is off fishing in Japan,
I thought I'd mention a bit more about Japanese
writing. A little known fact is that not all Chinese characters come from
China. The Japanese created a few characters themselves.
An example is 畑 [hata(ke)], which denotes a dry field as opposed to
田 [ta] which denotes a paddy. It was formed by combining
火 "fire" with 田.
Since 田 is a "real" Chinese character, it is read both [ta],
its native Japanese reading, and [den], its Sino-Japanese reading.
In contrast, 畑 has only the readings [hatake] and, in some compounds,
[hata], because it represents only a native Japanese morpheme; there is no
corresponding Chinese morpheme, so there is no Sino-Japanese reading.
Such characters are known as 国字 [kokuji] "national characters".