

Understanding the Japanese Writing System DESIGN | TYPEFACES



If you're wondering why sometimes I keep sharing articles on languages on a "typography newsletter", well, that's a legitimate question. Luckily, with a very legitimate answer, too. In order to understand the role of typography, it's absolutely critical to make sense of communication, first and foremost. What is it you're trying to communicate, and how are you going to do so?



But even these first steps, or questions, are easily flawed. It's easy to get caught up in the familiarity of our beloved communication systems, relying exclusively on one of them as a vehicle (say, your own written language) and dismissing other forms. The trouble with this is that it's easy to leave people out, even if unwillingly.



So getting back to the article; yes, Japanese writing systems. They're humbling, oh so humbling, especially for us here in the West with our latin-based languages, often forgetting that there almost always are problems that our (design) solutions don't cover. Reading about different languages and writing systems (and even reading), constantly frames my perspective into a new light and quickly makes me realise that "it's not that simple".



If, say, your website needs to provide support for a Japanese market, suddenly everything you traditionally know about typefaces, web fonts and Web layouts may not be enough: Today's written Japanese comprises a number of components: elements of kanji, hiragana, katakana and the Latin alphabet; as well as Arabic numbers and Greek characters for mathematical symbols, punctuation and units of measurement. This means that a typical document could include as many as six different scripts. If you look at the Arabic numbers and punctuation marks as supporting elements, then a Japanese sentence consists mainly of kanji, hiragana, katakana and the Latin alphabet.

In this short FontShop article, Toshiya Izumo gives us a brief introduction to the marvellous and fascinating world of Japanese typography. The fact that different sentence elements are written in a mixture of different scripts has a major significance to Japanese. There are no spaces between the individual characters and words; the different scripts indicate the sentence structure. However, the different script types enable general spellings and nuances to come through. This enables diverse writing expression in the Japanese language.

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