Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Clewza313 1915 days ago
It's a pretty subtle point, but the author is saying that "some words were originally written in kanji", while I'm noting that for a word like ここ, that's only true if you include the time when everything was originally written kanji. So the statement is technically correct, but IMHO rather misleading, since (the man'yogana pre-kana period aside) it's generally quite rare for word to make the leap from kanji to kana.

An even more subtle point is that kanji usage is fluid, so it's perfectly correct to write many words as kanji or kana, but with subtle shifts in meaning. For example, いい and 良い are both "good", but the latter is more formal and may even be read differently (yoi vs ii).

2 comments

My experience lies on the artice author's side of this discussion.

Read some original Mishima or Dazai and they use kanji for words that modern novelists generally don't. Pick up some late Edo texts and the kaji-to-kana ratio is even greater still.

More mundanely though, if you consider typical text messages or random notes in a notebook, it's really common for words to "make the leap from kanji to kana" simply due to laziness/convenience/whatever.

> An even more subtle point is that kanji usage is fluid, so it's perfectly correct to write many words as kanji or kana, but with subtle shifts in meaning. For example, いい and 良い are both "good", but the latter is more formal and may even be read differently (yoi vs ii).

Correct, and sometimes words who are otherwise written in Kanji can be written in Kana in order to put emphasis on them, similar to how we use italics in Western languages.