A word for silence
Japanese has a written word for the sound of silence — シーン — and you will find it stamped across mangahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga panels at exactly the moment when nothin...
The feature hiding in plain sight
Tokyo Japanesehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyodialect is a pitchaccent languagehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanesepitchaccent. Every word carries either a si...
What an honorific actually is
An honorific is not vocabulary about politeness. It is politeness as morphosyntax — the social variable fused into the verb stem, the pronoun paradigm, the noun, the s...
Third in the world at reading — while carrying the heaviest script
Japan scored 516 on PISA 2022 readinghttps://www.oecd.org/pisa/ — third globally — while asking every child to internalize the mos...
The oldest classification for any writing system — and what two thousand years have done to it
In 100 CE, the Han scholar Xu Shenhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XuShen 許慎 finished the Shuowen Jieziht...
An indexing algorithm that has survived 310 years
Pick a character — say 漢. Open a paper dictionary. How do you find it? There is no alphabet. There are tens of thousands of glyphs. You need a key....
3,200 years of continuous deployment
The kanji you study tonight were carved into turtle shells under the late Shang dynastyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shangdynasty. Anyang divination pits on one...