So the title of the book is in the top right corner, the four characters written from top to bottom. There are actually three words there. But wait, you say, how can that be? There’s no spacing or anything to denote different words!
Well, remember how I mentioned that Japanese has not one, not two, but three alphabets? Well, this friggin’ title uses every single one of them. Every word is in a different alphabet.
The first word is:
キノ
This is katakana, the phonetic Japanese alphabet typically used for names, especially names of foreign origin. The first character, “キ”, is “ki”, pronounced “kee”. The second character, “ノ”, is pronounced “no”. So this is “Kino” — someone’s name.
The second word is in the hiragana alphabet, which is the phonetic alphabet used for native Japanese words and concepts that aren’t expressed in other alphabets:
の
Which is pronounced “no”. It is a “particle”, used as a possessive in this sentence, like ‘de’ in Spanish except with the word order reversed (it’d be Viaje de Kino en español).
The third word is:
旅
This is kanji, and blatantly stolen from Chinese (it means the same thing in written Chinese). This one symbol is the word “Tabi” (pronounced “tah-bee”), or Journey. The ‘no’ preceding it means that it belongs to Kino.
So the four Japanese characters of the title of the book,
キノの旅
is, translated to English, “Kino’s Journey”. If you were speaking Japanese, you’d say “kee-no no tah-bee”. The Kanji being the hard one there — that’s a complicated friggin’ mess and a quick glance at a Kanji list did *not* turn it up, I had to poke it into Google Translate and then backport the word ‘Journey’ to Japanese via an English-to-Japanese dictionary to get the Japanese pronunciation.
No bloody spaces. Three friggin alphabets. What a language. Sigh!
- Badtux the Monolingual Penguin
You used to be so busy. Lots of time on your hands now?
Cheers!
JzB
Lots of vacation time, though I’m at work right now. I was considering going backpacking during my vacation time but (shrug). What can I say, it’s cold and wet outside and hard to get motivated.
Those conditions motivate me to stay in bed.
I have too many things to do to stay in bed
.
Then there is kaisho and sosho styles to consider.
Well, luckily sousho, basically “cursive”, is very rare unless you’re looking at Japanese art books or other antiquities, you certainly aren’t going to see it on street signs or product labels or mainstream Japanese books because even most Japanese can’t read it. Most of the kanji you see will be in the kaisho form, which is sort of equivalent to “printing”, and most of the other stylized kanji calligraphy styles are easily readable if you know the kaisho form.