The Types Analysis And The Cultural Distinction Of Chinese Characters In Modern Japanese

The Chinese Characters' development in Japan could bedescribed as the process of the adaptation of a tool used to recordlanguages and of the accumulation as a cultural element. Theprogress which Chinese characters melting into Japanese has gonelike this: 1) Chinese characters were wholly accepted as a foreignlanguage (borrowed words); 2) during the application, kokuzis,hiraganas and katukanas came into being; 3) Chinese characters andthe Japanese words are used in the mixture manner. In the modernJapanese, Chinese characters belong to the borrowed-oriented words.Their theory of formation not merely observes the principles in thetraditional "LiuShu" and the related regulations, the unique Chinesecharacters' awareness and nationality of Japanese nation could alsobe traced in their development.This article would set its target on the Chinese characters' typesand its cultural distinctions in modern Japanese. We tries to analyzethe characters of their formation, search their origin, discuss theirfunctions in expressing and the influence on the creation of kokuzis, hiraganas and katukanas. In this way, the cultural meaning carriedby the words could be discovered. We mainly conduct the systemicanalysis on those Chinese characters in Japanese based on The List ofChinese Characters Frequently Used, which was issued by theJapanese Cabinet in 1981, and The Dictionary ofDayi Hanwa. Thereare 1945 Chinese characters (among which 8 kokuzis) and 285Chinese names in the shape of character (among which 4 kokuzis) inthe List; while 210 kokuzis in the Dictionary. These total 2428Chinese characters are our targets of research for the systemicanalysis. Through comparison, they have enriched and developed thetheories of "LiuShu" and the related ones. According to the types oforigins of Chinese characters, the ones in Japanese are divided intothese two categories: borrowed words and self-made words(including kokuzis, hiraganas and katukanas). According to thecorrespondent relationship between borrowed words and Chinesecharacters and to the Japanese own distinction, we classify theborrowed words into whole-borrowed words, the sound-borrowedones, the meaning-borrowed ones and the shape-borrowed ones; byof the nature of the radicals and their combination, the kokuzis aredivided into six types, namely the pictographs, the associativecompounds, the mark, the joint-phonetics, the pictophonetics and theideograph variant; and the hiraganas and katukanas are put into the ideograph variant according to the transformation and thedistinction of the words. By analyzing the cultural distinctions in thesingle words, phrases, word system, the form of the word in Japanese,we have discovered the unique Japanese culture awareness and thetheory of forming words berried within.