Talk:Jinmeiyō kanji

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Hello all -- pardon my French, literally, I'm just using autotranlation from the French wikipedia article on this and then cleaning up the language. Any help is appreciated. --Arcadian 16:07, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'm going to add the {attention} tag to this page so that hopefully someone who knows a little something about Jinmeiyo Kanji or French will help clean up the untranslated portions.

I don't know much about this, but according to this article, as of September 2004 or so there are 773 Jinmeiyo Kanji. I'll try to find to time to do some research and finish Jmabel's clean up, but it could take a while. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable will take this on first. -Adjusting 07:14, 2005 Apr 15 (UTC)

• Looks like this has been done. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:27, Apr 30, 2005 (UTC)

Contents 1 Translation from French 2 Meaning of "jinmeiyo" 3 Additional Kanji 4 778 or 774? 5 Ambiguous preposition 6 Question about 蒼

[edit] Translation from French

The following is moved from Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English:

This page is about a Japanese character set, kanji, however the page was translated from the French version of this page. Some of the French is still in the page. My guess is that either a French or Japanese speaker could finish this page.

• I nailed most of the French (though there was one set of tricky prepositions and one just plain ambiguity that may need to be resolved by someone who actually knows the topic). I improved on the machine translations of the French translations of Japanese (!) but may not yet have all of them correct. Those should be quick work for someone with Japanese and English. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:42, Apr 10, 2005 (UTC)

• The key to this page might be that 90% of the words are very ordinary Putonghua words. See Taipei's Far East Book Company English-Chinese dictionaries to check. A native Chinese or Japanese who is adroit at those two countries cross relations could probably provide a salient explanation of the role of these words in Japan. My guess is that most people with these names are children of parents who are educated and very simpatico with China. As far as individual words such as 'excrement' and 'cancer' are concerned as used in names I believe that these items can be tweaked by parents with a positive attitude to create positive energy and popularity for the child involved. What I'm saying is that Jinmeiyo is a good thing, not a bad thing, but it requires a little imagination to use these words properly. There is no shortage of such names in the Western list of first and last names. (Richard Agar, William Shatner, and Jello Biafra are examples of slightly strange names with very solid parsed value.) Therefore, one should assume that for the most part, Jinmeiyo names are expressly taught to expand the Japanese body's student mind. Ordinary names like Tanaka, Honda and Kawata are made of very very simple pairs of words. These would correspond to names like Stubbs, Jones and Davis; or to first names like Bob, Sue and Bill. The Jinmeiyo names are so complicated and interesting, and it is difficult to think of examples that Westerners would remember. These Jinmeiyo names would correspond to more complicated Western names like Asimov, Bradbury, P. Diddy, Ridenhour and Rokhabit. Such first names could include Siobhan, Donatella or Clay. In other words, these are very wiki names insofar as they are information-positive and -participative. Indeed, when one looks at the Chinese word for Wiki one might see this very idea (wei ji could be easily translated as 'unexploited genetics', to take a little poetic license). To extrapolate, this Jinmeiyo method is used unknowingly by westerners to create words like Tangerine Dream, Phish, Bad Religion and Flavor Flav. To further extrapolate, this method is used to create beautiful, unusual words like Chicago, Des Moines, Vancouver and San Luis Obispo. If you think about it, most place names are like this. As the gist of the list of the kanji involved is virtually 100% regular Chinese that didn't make it to Japan ca 400 ad, when Japan became 'kanjified', or are simply words that have historical sensitivity to Japanese people while remaining firmily within the lexicon of the educated people there, this geopolitical usage is key to figuring out why this page is important. Nuff said. It might take an expert to tweak this properly.
• McDogm Apr 28 2005 1210 est usa

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[edit] Meaning of "jinmeiyo"

It occurs to me that Jin means Gold in Japanese, as a direct adaptation of the Hanzi Pinyin 'Gold'. And, 'Mei' generally means beautiful in Asianspeak. Cf Mei Guo, Mi Guk. Gold is a very positive word. This gives more support to the idea that Jinmeiyo kanji are very good kanji to use, the name Jinmeiyo giving a lot of support to the words presented in the list, especially the ones that seem questionable and difficult viz the article.McDogm--McDogm 07:48, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

No. 人名用漢字 means 'Kanji designated for personal names'. --Jondel 08:33, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

Gold is 'gin' with a hard g sound as in gold(金).　Beautiful is mi (美).--Jondel 09:21, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

Technically, gold is kin. It's just that the /k/ is frequently voiced in compounds due to rendaku. — Gwalla | Talk 21:38, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Kanji were borrowed in the 5th through 9th centuries, and their on-yomi come from various Chinese dialects. Furthermore, both Chinese and Japanese have undergone some sound change since then. So any attempt to assign connections based on similarities between modern pronunciation in Japanese and in a single dialect of Chinese is problematic. — Gwalla | Talk 21:38, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Just for absolute clarity: 人 (person) 名 (name) 用 (use) 漢字 (Chinese character). Exploding Boy 23:09, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Additional Kanji

When I was experimenting with Chinese characters by converting them into Japanese in Excite.JP (as random kana and kanji), I came across 3 new Jinmeiyo:

瞬 (Madoka) 眠 (Nemuri) 勇 (Isamu)

I'll see if I can get more later on.

MORE KANJI: 祥 (Sachi), 逸 (Itsu), 晴 (Hare), 晶川 (Shōsen)

--Datavi X 18:47, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 778 or 774?

How come is it that the section claiming to give the "Complete list of the 778 jinmeiyō kanji" actually gives 774? Also, how come is it nobody bothered to count? --Gro-Tsen 14:20, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ambiguous preposition

In two places in the article, it mentions kanji being "transferred in the jōyō kanji". The meaning of this is unclear. Were the characters transferred from or to the jōyō list? - dcljr (talk) 02:04, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Question about 蒼

I'm not entirely sure who to ask about this, so I'll ask it here.

蒼 in the old sense means green, but in today's sence, it now means blue, with a fairly new kanji 緑 now meaning green. My question is, how often is this kanji used in Japan? When do they teach this to new learners?---"THROUGH FIRE, JUSTICE IS SERVED!" 22:43, 22 January 2007 (UTC)