Question about japanese and kanji

3 comments

1. You do find made up words on media like this from time to time. So it is possible, but you can’t pick any random kanji and expect it to make sense

2. Kanji are totally used as words, they don’t have to be concepts, but they certainly have a greater capacity to be interpreted as such.

   The reason why you can’t write abstract words in “Kanji” without them coming out as strange gibberish is the same as in any language, the words wouldn’t be written in a language at that point.

   Putting aside the fact that “Kanji” themselves are Phono-Semantic Logo-Syllabograms that are shared by dozens of languages, and are not a language in and of themselves;

   If you were just looking at this from a Japanese Language perspective the only way for your “words” to not sound like gibberish is to write them according to the rules of the Japanese Language.

   Exceptions could be given to works of art, you see this in anime and manga all of the timr. But even then you would need to provide context for this to make sense.

3. Yes, you can absolutely use different kanji and use their concept together to create “new words” and that is heavily used in fiction. For example character names are often puns and the choice of kanji kind of reflect who/what the character is. For example a character called Usada 兎田 (rabbit rice field) for a character who is literally a rabbit (while 田 is commonly found in family name).

   Lot of action manga with character using techniques/attack will use just cool kanji for the meaning they have. You really think that something like this in One Piece totally make sense 閻王三刀龍 一百三情飛龍侍極 ? No, not more than “King of Hell Three Sword Dragon: 103 Emotions Flying Dragon Samurai Extreme” make much sense, but at the same time, we kind of get the idea of it.

   While sometime the real pronunciation of the kanji is used, sometimes they just make up completely different reading. A good example would be found in the translation of Harry Potter where the dementor is translated as 吸魂鬼 with the furigana ディメンター. So clearly, it is ment to be read “dimenta”, but from the kanji, we get the meaning of sucking energy demon (that can remind you of how vampire is written 吸血鬼 sucking blood demon).

   However, you cannot just make up words and expect them to just make sense all the time, so yes, it can come across as gibberish if not properly done.