A plea to Japanese (or Asian) Language Web Developers
-
Indeed they are. I really meant to say syllables. In most cases, kanji letters, when strung together, act as a single syllable. For example, the kanji for 'person' could be read 'hito' when standalone, or 'jin' when it's a part of a word. However, in most cases, they're standalone syllables, unlike (for example) 'ho' + 'u', which is read 'hoo' (long 'o'). At least that is what I know. I don't have much formal training when it comes to Japanese. I mostly learn it out of self interest.
I think you actually mean katakana, not kanji. Japanese use two phonetic character sets: katakana and hiragana. Historically, hiragana was used by women and katakana was used by men, and you can still see that history in the characters themselves. Hiragana tend to be more round and have loops, while katakana tend to be more angular. In modern usage, hiragana is used for native Japanese words and katakana is used for foreign words. Kanji are Chinese characters, and each is a word in itself, representing a distinct concept. They are not used as syllables, because that's what katakana and hiragana were created for. When kanji are strung together it is to merge the concepts together to describe a new thing that can't be described adequately by any existing single character (again, just like we do with Greek and Latin roots). All the characters in both katakana and hiragana were derived from kanji that have the same pronunciation, and most (possibly all?) retain the meaning of the original kanji, even though that's not typically how they're used. It's pretty common to see kanji and hiragana together, and there are two general cases. First, small hiragana are sometimes placed above or below a kanji character as a pronunciation guide, called furigana, because children are generally taught hiragana first and gradually introduced to kanji as they get older. Second, hiragana are often added to the end of a kanji word (one or more characters) to indicate verb conjugation, because Japanese has verb tenses and Mandarin (which kanji were actually created for) does not. Anyway, I hope I didn't go too overboard there. I actually do have some formal training in both Chinese and Japanese. Not enough to claim even moderate fluency, sadly, but enough to understand how the writing systems work.
-
I think you actually mean katakana, not kanji. Japanese use two phonetic character sets: katakana and hiragana. Historically, hiragana was used by women and katakana was used by men, and you can still see that history in the characters themselves. Hiragana tend to be more round and have loops, while katakana tend to be more angular. In modern usage, hiragana is used for native Japanese words and katakana is used for foreign words. Kanji are Chinese characters, and each is a word in itself, representing a distinct concept. They are not used as syllables, because that's what katakana and hiragana were created for. When kanji are strung together it is to merge the concepts together to describe a new thing that can't be described adequately by any existing single character (again, just like we do with Greek and Latin roots). All the characters in both katakana and hiragana were derived from kanji that have the same pronunciation, and most (possibly all?) retain the meaning of the original kanji, even though that's not typically how they're used. It's pretty common to see kanji and hiragana together, and there are two general cases. First, small hiragana are sometimes placed above or below a kanji character as a pronunciation guide, called furigana, because children are generally taught hiragana first and gradually introduced to kanji as they get older. Second, hiragana are often added to the end of a kanji word (one or more characters) to indicate verb conjugation, because Japanese has verb tenses and Mandarin (which kanji were actually created for) does not. Anyway, I hope I didn't go too overboard there. I actually do have some formal training in both Chinese and Japanese. Not enough to claim even moderate fluency, sadly, but enough to understand how the writing systems work.
Yes, sorry. I meant one kanji letter is usually one syllable, though is some cases, it could be more than one (like the kanji for mountain in 'Fujiyama'). Like I said in my original post, katakana/hiragana in many cases require more than one letter to produce a syllable. When I said 'syllable', it's from the perspective of someone who's used to Latin alphabet, thus 'yama' is two syllables, though it's written with one kanji. And 'he + i' (which is read 'hee' with a long 'e') is a single syllable, though it's written with two hiraganas. So what I'm trying to say is, while you could split words consisting only of kanji into two lines with ease, that migh not be the case with words containing horagana/katakana, due to that reason, as it might confuse the reader. Or at least makes it harder for them to read. Now, I don't know what kind of provision the Japanese language has for dealing with word splitting for line breaks, but personally, I've never seen any split words in the texts (*cough*manga*cough*) I've read. I don't know about websites though.
-
Yes, sorry. I meant one kanji letter is usually one syllable, though is some cases, it could be more than one (like the kanji for mountain in 'Fujiyama'). Like I said in my original post, katakana/hiragana in many cases require more than one letter to produce a syllable. When I said 'syllable', it's from the perspective of someone who's used to Latin alphabet, thus 'yama' is two syllables, though it's written with one kanji. And 'he + i' (which is read 'hee' with a long 'e') is a single syllable, though it's written with two hiraganas. So what I'm trying to say is, while you could split words consisting only of kanji into two lines with ease, that migh not be the case with words containing horagana/katakana, due to that reason, as it might confuse the reader. Or at least makes it harder for them to read. Now, I don't know what kind of provision the Japanese language has for dealing with word splitting for line breaks, but personally, I've never seen any split words in the texts (*cough*manga*cough*) I've read. I don't know about websites though.
If katakana/hiragana are present in typed Japanese there will also be spaces. There might not be if it's pure kanji, but anyone who can read that is already having to figure out a lot from context (verb tense, etc) so putting a line break in the wrong spot is not likely to increase their cognitive load significantly.