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The word Japan is an exonym, and is used (in one form or another) by many languages. The Japanese names for Japan are Nihon ( にほん ⓘ) and Nippon ( にっぽん ⓘ ). They are both written in Japanese using the kanji 日本 . During the third-century CE Three Kingdoms period, Japan was inhabited by the Yayoi people who lived in Kyushu up ...
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords ...
Kanji (漢字, Japanese pronunciation: [kaɲdʑi]) are the logographic Chinese characters adapted from the Chinese script used in the writing of Japanese. [1] They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequently-derived syllabic scripts of hiragana and katakana.
An example of this mixed style is the Kojiki, which was written in AD 712. Japanese writers then started to use Chinese characters to write Japanese in a style known as man'yōgana, a syllabic script which used Chinese characters for their sounds in order to transcribe the words of Japanese speech mora by mora. Over time, a writing system evolved.
The name for Japan in Japanese is written using the kanji 日本 and is pronounced Nihon or Nippon. [9] Before 日本 was adopted in the early 8th century, the country was known in China as Wa (倭, changed in Japan around 757 to 和) and in Japan by the endonym Yamato. [10]
The word Nihon written in kanji (horizontal placement of characters). The text means "Japan" in Japanese. Prince Shōtoku was a semi-legendary regent of the Asuka period, and considered to be the first major sponsor of Buddhism in Japan.
koto. [8] 琴, a traditional stringed musical instrument from Japan, resembling a zither with 13 strings. makimono. [9] 巻物, a horizontal Japanese hand scroll, of ink-and-brush painting or calligraphy. manga. まんが or 漫画 listen ⓘ, (English IPA : [mæŋgɜː]) Japanese comics; refers to comics in general in Japanese. noh.
Japanese is written without spaces between words, and, to aid understanding, foreign phrases and names are sometimes transliterated with an interpunct separating the words, called a nakaguro (中黒, middle dot); for example, ビル・ゲイツ .