Talk:Ateji

Kun-doku

 * Ateji (当て字) meaning 'given characters' are kanji used to write Japanese words.

This is misleading. It sounds more like a definition for Kun-doku.

Ateji is when kanji are used purely phonetically without regard to meaning. The words can be Japanese in origin, or (as the article shows) foreign imports.

It's called "kun-yomi" and not "kun-doku". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.60.169.54 (talk • contribs) 16:37, 20 December 2005

USA
Interesting bit of info, but I don't know that is belongs in the article: brain 06:30, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * The old spelling for "America" (amerika) was written in ateji as "亜米利加". Thus the name for the United States became beikoku (米国), or "rice country", due to the use of the second character in amerika.
 * It's also wrong, as far as I know. The use of 米国 (mei-guo comes from Chinese, where 米 is pronounced somewhat like the second syllable in "uh-MEH-rih-cuh". Likewise, 英 in 英国 (ying-guo, England) is like "EENG-land", etc. They did this because way back when, they needed convenient country names instead of bizarre, alien-sounding syllabic constructions. -MissingNOOO 04:13, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Meiguo is written 美國 (i.e., beautiful country, not rice country). The above explanation is actually correct and a similar phenomenon is responsible for all the kanji which are abbreviations for countries and languages (仏語 for French [lit. Buddha language], 独語 for German [lit. independent language], etc.).   The 米 rather than 亜 was used because 亜 was already short for 亜細亜 アジア.  Also, as this example should demonstrate, there is not a one-to-one mapping between Chinese names for foreign places (which are all still written using nonsense characters since there is no phonetic alphabet in Chinese) and ateji, even if some (like 英) are the same.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.19.88.88 (talk) 05:23, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Some questions on new pronunciations for existing kanji
What do the characters 煙草 (tabako) actually mean?

And what is the process by which a new pronunciation gets associated with a combination of characters like this, or 宿敵 shukuteki 'mortal enemy' as raibaru 'rival' -- both historically and for recent coinages?

And why/when in modern times would kanji be used for this rather than katakana? —Preceding unsigned comment added by BindingArbitration (talk • contribs) 08:31, 21 November 2008 (UTC)


 * 煙 is smoke and 草 is grass. tobacco is brought to Japan at the end of 16th century and the word has been used for long. I don't know the process. As for improvised/forced use or shukuteki, it's just a writer's personal preference, not a standard pronunciation. You can find the use in a novel, the word 宿敵 with ライバル furigana. But I personally think this kind of writing stupid. Oda Mari (talk) 15:38, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

煙草 is probably from Chinese. The word is found in Chinese (although possibly introduced from Japanese). These kind of words aren't usually nonce creations. They are often Chinese words, to which Japanese readings have been attached.

Bathrobe (talk) 04:08, 22 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Additional info. As for tobacco, there are also 多巴古, 佗波古, 多葉粉, and 莨, but 煙草 is the most widely used ateji. Oda Mari (talk) 04:45, 22 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Tobacco in Chinese is 煙草, 烟草 ( yan1 cao3 ), 香煙(traditional) or 香烟 ( xiang1 yan1 ). But I have no idea about the Chinese and Japanese relation of the word. Oda Mari (talk) 04:59, 22 November 2008 (UTC)


 * As Mari points out, the relationship between Chinese and Japanese words is often problematic unless you know the etymology and the history. 煙草 may have been first used in Chinese, and the characters borrowed into Japanese but read tabako (熟字訓). But it's always possible that the Chinese word crossed into Chinese from Japanese, that is, 煙草 was first used in Japan and then crossed into Chinese. It's not always possible to tell, especially with relatively new concepts like tabako, which is not part of the traditional vocabulary in either Chinese or Japanese.
 * Bathrobe (talk) 21:12, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Difference between ateji and kun'yomi
The article says:


 * "Ateji should not be confused with kun'yomi (訓読み), Japanese reading, or native reading, where a kanji is assigned the native Japanese equivalent as its reading."

but in the next paragraph it also says:


 * "The converse, where the kanji characters are used for their meaning without regard to their original reading and are assigned a new reading, is also a form of ateji."

Although we're told "not to be confused", the article does not actually make clear the difference. The explanation of kun'yomi (characters used for their meaning and assigned a new reading -- in this case one based on the equivalent native Japanese word) exactly fits what is then termed a type of ateji ("characters are used for their meaning without regard to their original reading and are assigned a new reading").

I'm guessing the distinction is something to do with (i) the fact that kun'yomi were established a long time ago are are now "fixed", such that no new ones are coined (if they were then they would be called ateji?), and (ii) the fact that kun'yomi readings are always native Japanese words rather than loanwords from other languages. I'm not sure enough to want to edit the article, however. 86.182.103.180 (talk) 14:30, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

Space conserving characters
环境依存文字 does not mean space conserving characters. It just means it depends on a particular OS/encoding to be displayed properly, or literally "environment dependent characters".

Refer to this paragraph: Some non-kanji symbols or Latin character abbreviations also have loanword readings, often quite long; a common example is '%' (the percent sign), which has the five kana reading パーセント, while the word "centimeter" is generally written as "cm" (with two half-width characters, so occupying one space) and has the seven kana reading センチメートル (it can also be written as 糎, as with kilometer above, though this is very rare). Many borrowed measurement terms may be written as tiny abbreviations stuffed into a single character space called 環境依存文字 'space conserving characters': ㌢ senchi 'cm', ㌔ kiro 'kilo', etc.

Please refer to here http://www.office-qa.com/win/win61.htm &#124;lllll (talk) 17:55, 26 October 2014 (UTC)