New Kanji on the Block

December 27, 2020 10:12 AM

Highlights of Japan’s new Kanji of the Year include ingenious neologisms for social distance, laptop, web conference (incorporating a “Z” for Zoom), and sign language, presented by Eileen Cheng-yin Chow. Contest website.
posted by adrianhon (19 comments total)

I think the article in English is about "Kanji of the Year" and the main link is about "New" or newly created kanji?

As someone still learning kanji, I'm not sure we need more of them. However these are really creative!
posted by vacapinta at 11:22 AM on December 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

It’s possible! “Mitsu” references social distancing in both. If it’s confusing, please ignore the English article and use Google Translate on the contest website.
posted by adrianhon at 11:53 AM on December 27, 2020

Mod note: removed the article in English since it was pointing the wrong place, carry on.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 11:59 AM on December 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

As a Japanese learner, I love this contest. It tends to attract a fair number of over-wrought and cheesy entries, but there are others that could easily pass for "real" kanji if you didn't know better. Here are a few of my favorites from previous years:

"hearsay" -- the kanji 聞 (hearing) nested inside of itself

"veterinarian" -- from 医 (doctor, medicine) along with the 犭 radical that appears in many of the characters for animals

"falling cherry blossoms" -- a combination of 花 (flower) and 風 (wind)

"Mount Fuji, reflected" -- based on 山 (mountain)

"new beginning" -- a modified version of 終 ("end"), with the 冬 ("winter") component swapped out for 春 ("spring")
posted by teraflop at 12:18 PM on December 27, 2020 [6 favorites]

Would it be accurate to say that some of these are basically visual puns?
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:53 PM on December 27, 2020 [3 favorites]

That social distance kanji is just about perfect.
posted by mhoye at 2:04 PM on December 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

Is this just a friendly contest for cash prizes? Do they incorporate the kanji into word processors? Submit them to some sort of académie for formal inclusion into the language?
posted by Room 101 at 3:38 PM on December 27, 2020

I got excited, then realized that kanji and kaiju aren’t the same thing, but I stayed excited nevertheless. I like the mix of logo design cleverness like the “Z” or the laptop, but for symbols that seem like they’ll be completely plausible written neologisms.
posted by migurski at 4:13 PM on December 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

Is this a thing, are new kanji invented and used because of contests like this? Or is this just a bit of fun?
posted by signal at 4:58 PM on December 27, 2020

I'm just a beginner but it's my understanding that new kanji are not really minted, this kind of thing is mostly for fun. New words are mostly made out of existing kanji, or using katakana, which is a phonetic alphabet used in japanese for loan words. You've probably seen these on consumer electronics before, like, カメラ is literally "ka me ra" or camera.
posted by RustyBrooks at 5:45 PM on December 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

Yeah, these are basically for fun. There are a few new kanji that were minted in ye olden days (after the standard X,000 were imported from China). In Japan these are called kokuji 国字 or “national characters” and can be identified because they either don’t exist in China, or do but were very obscure and independently invented—a famous example is 峠, “mountain pass” from mountain 山 + up 上 + down 下. But nowadays it’s just for fun really. One major obstacle is that if your character isn’t in a character set for computers, no one will be able to use it in the first place, because the vast majority of “writing” these days is on phones/tablets/computers.

I’m less familiar with the situation in China but I believe it’s a similar story over a similar timescale. New words are expressed as new compounds of existing characters (or sometimes with roman characters—Victor Mair posts about this often on Language Log) rather than new characters. The exceptions are interesting precisely because they’re so rare.
posted by No-sword at 6:12 PM on December 27, 2020 [4 favorites]

Yeah these are a combination of visual pun and portmanteau overall, and the whole thing is mostly just for fun, with a bit of creative engagement with the nature of Chinese characters thrown in for good measure. I really like these overall!
posted by DoctorFedora at 11:12 PM on December 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

> New words are expressed as new compounds of existing characters (or sometimes with roman characters—Victor Mair posts about this often on Language Log) rather than new characters. The exceptions are interesting precisely because they’re so rare.

Something else that happens is that existing characters are given a new meaning, an example being 囧 which has been given the meaning of awkward, given it sort of looks like an awkward face.

In the Hong Kong protests there was a lot of creativity around new characters, but none of them can be written. It's a bit of a shame and technical challenge...it is a shame that it's very very difficult for there to be character innovation, but the UTF format makes it basically impossible. Not sure if this will be a problem anyone will really deal with in my lifetime, but it'd be cool for the technology to support character innovation...
posted by wooh at 11:28 PM on December 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

Oh man, I really wish I read Japanese, so that I could fully appreciate all the other ones shown on the Japanese website! (I can read Chinese so recognize a lot of the characters that are being riffed off of, but without the explanation of the meaning it's hard to fully appreciate -- Google Translate into English translates some but by no means all of the explanations, unfortunately.)
posted by andrewesque at 10:41 AM on December 28, 2020

andrewesque: if there are any that particularly intrigue you, I think my Japanese skills are probably still good enough to decipher the descriptions for you
posted by Cogito at 5:46 PM on December 28, 2020

the UTF format makes it basically impossible

You mean, Unicode? I don't see what UTF in particular has to do with it?

Unicode Ideographic Description Sequences (quite intentionally) aren't required to render, otherwise that could be an option. Apparently there's an unmaintained MediaWiki extension that supports IDS, I haven't played with it though.
posted by dougfelt at 9:50 PM on December 28, 2020

Cogito: you're so thoughtful! If you're still around, the ones I'm particularly curious about are the ones from Nantou in Taiwan, specifically the three that are riffs on:

- 左 and 手
- 正 and 方
- 步 on top of 步

(The other two have successful English translations via Google Translate so I've understood them!)
posted by andrewesque at 12:23 PM on December 29, 2020

It looks like these don't have as much explanation as the rest, but here's what's written. Each character has a 音 entry identifying the "on[-yomi]" or sound-reading which typically is derived from the sound the character has in Chinese as well as 訓 (意味) entry identifying the "kun[-yomi] (imi)" which is the native Japanese reading (meaning) which is derived from the pre-kanji sounds that Japanese used for the concept associated with the Han character. So the on-yomi can be transliterated, but not really translated. Also, as you may have realized "普台小学校5年" is the name of the elementary school and grade and the entries below that are the names of the students who came up with them.

左 (left) and 手 (hand)

on-yomi: SHU, kun-yomi: hidarite (left hand)

正 (correct) and 方 (way/direction)

on-yomi: SEIHOU, kun-yomi: seihoukei (square, as in the shape)

For this last one, I think it's 止 on top of 步, not 步 on top of 步

止 (stop) on top of 步 (walk)

on-yomi: SHI, kun-yomi: yasumu (rest)

The other two are relatively straightforward combinations of two-character words that exist in Japanese already: small on top of year = boy (shonen) and two on top of 100 = 200 (ni-hyaku).
posted by Cogito at 4:03 PM on December 29, 2020

Whenever this kind of thread springs up, I am reminded how awful the status of Han unification is and how much extra support it requires (especially in typical anglo-normative contexts) and would have required even if its design decisions had been much better.

In the threadreader link of the FPP, you can see one of its real world consequences. The post included one character 画, which (at least when the browser's language setting is English) was displayed without the topmost horizontal stroke being connected to anything else. This is not how it is written in Japanese, and it needed special support to display correctly. In HTML this can be done by the lang tag, and

<span lang="ja">画</span>

vs.

<span lang="zh-Hans">画</span>

should have resulted in different characters being displayed. However, even if the underlying HTML standard and technology is widely supported, on social media (e.g. Twitter, ThreadReader, and maybe Metafilter) it's problematic because the user doesn't have control over the technical aspects of their own language context. The social media takes "user-generated content" and spews out HTML on its own, a process beyond the poster's control. Especially where anglohood is default and everything else is exotic strings without context, or with a colonized context.
posted by runcifex at 2:10 AM on December 30, 2020 [1 favorite]