rone: (Default)
entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones ([personal profile] rone) wrote2003-11-02 03:58 pm
Entry tags:

japanese wackiness

I noticed that, on my Cowboy Bebop Future Blues OST box, one of the tracks listed is apparently written in katakana, hiragana, and kanji. Why would they mix the three writing systems on the same name?

[identity profile] yong-mi.livejournal.com 2003-11-02 05:00 pm (UTC)(link)
If it's anything like Korean (where we use the phonetic Korean writing and Chinese characters together), switching to solely Hiragana would not necessarily be simple.

Chinese characters (or kanji, as you are referring to them) are very dense in meaning. Sometimes what would take up to a paragraph if written out phonetically using regular language can be compressed to two (or four) Chinese characters. It is also the case that there are many words that sound the same and thus would be phonetically written the same, yet would be written with completely different Chinese characters.