Re: Were IJN submarines named?


"Ned Kelly" <inquiries@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> a écrit dans le message de news:
dtlpdl$s6m$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


Christophe Chazot wrote:
"Christophe Chazot" <c.chazot@xxxxxxxxxx> a écrit dans le message de
news: 43fdaed0$0$6680$8fcfb975@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(snip)

No, they just had numbers preceded by a kanji character.


a katakana character, sorry.

No it is kanji but if I remember correctly it is the kanji I that the
katakana I was developed from. It is often written in katakana or roman
character but the kanji is the official designation.

Not the least. Katakana and Hiragana are derivated from Kanji, but they are
called Katakana and Hiragana, not Kanji.
"I" is the kana derivated from a simplified "I" Kanji but it is written in a
different way (the kana is limited to the left half of the kanji in this
case). And it is the katakana, not the kanji, that was painted on the hulls
and sails of the subs, because kanjis were too complicated and cramped to be
read from a few hundred yards (one just sees a square pack of dots and lines
and you're unable to see which character it is - same reason lead to the
writing of DD's names in white Katakana on the sides of the hull).

Kan means Korea(n) and Ji means letter, so Kanji means "Korean character"
but is translated as "Chinese character" (and in fact ARE close to today's
Chinese characters, not Korean ones).
Kana means syllabary, kata means something like "main lines" because it is
supposed to draw the "strength lines" of the Kanji.
Hira means clerk and hiragana was a syllabary developed by monks for their
administration.
These two syllabary were developed in parallel, some say by imperial
administration and monks' administration, to enable the writing of japanese
words or grammar marks that could not be written in Chinese characters, and
were later adopted as phonetic syllabaries to enable low-grade pupils and
students to write and read.

Whatever their history, kanas are definetely not kanjis. They are written in
a different, much simpler way, and the syllabary that they encode is much
less rich than the Kanji readings. One can easily see the difference in a
newspaper for instance : the core of words is written in kanji but grammar
ends and link words are in hiragana, and katakana is used to transcript
western words.
And the subs pennant numbers were written with a katakana followed by a
western number.


Regards,
Christophe Chazot


.

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