Chaos or system?

Abstract

Abstract This paper seeks to reassess the balance between chaos and systematicity within the Japanese writing system (JWS), which is noted for its complexity. As potential factors for chaos, Section 2 focuses on two important conventions. The first is the simultaneous use of multiple scripts as components of a largely systematic whole, even though it also affords considerable levels of graphematic variation. The second convention of dual-readings turns on kanji graphematically mapping to both Native-Japanese (NJ) and Sino-Japanese (SJ) morphemes, which yields the JWS’s intriguing form of morphography. However, as a factor that is, to a considerable degree, a major source of systematicity, Section 3 outlines the graphematic representation of SJ compound words. More specifically, starting from the morphological structures of two-kanji compound words (2KCWs), Section 3 introduces the dominant morphological patterns of three-kanji (3KCWs) and four-kanji compound words (4KCWs), which underscore the significance of 2KCWs within the Japanese mental lexicon, and concludes by noting Hatano, Kuhara, and Akiyama’s (1981) study about inferring the meanings of SJ compound words.