Does Japanese have proper nouns. As in Names

3 comments

1. You can theoretically make a name in any of the CJKV Languages (including Japanese) using any combination of Chinese Characters (although there are practical and legal limitations to consider)

   More to your question

   (1) There are some Characters that are used more often or almost exclusively in names

   (2) There are Nanori readings for Characters that are essentially used exclusively for names.

   – https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanori

2. Japanese grammar generally doesn’t make much fuss about common nouns vs. proper nouns, but psychologically speaking Japanese speakers are still able to distinguish between nouns that refer to classes of objects and nouns that refer to specific, named people or objects.

   I personally advise against reading too much into the kanji that are used for names. Japanese people generally don’t think of someone named Yuuki as being named Brave Energy (or whatever characters you use to write it); they think of him as being named Yuuki. This is compounded by the fact that, while there are common and popular kanji used regularly for names, some parents can play very loose and fast with which kanji they choose.

3. Plenty of names use Kanji that are fairly uncommon. For example my friend’s name is “祐子” (Yuuko), but all the words that use the 祐 kanji are pretty uncommon.

   Personally speaking, I’ve never had trouble telling when something is someone’s name. Names always “sound like” names, not like regular words. Many times they use relatively uncommon pronunciations of the kanji compared to regular words. For example the “suke” character 介 that’s used in names like Yuusuke is pretty much never pronounced “suke” in regular words.

   English has some names that are just regular words too, like Violet or Faith or Hunter or Cliff. But we would very rarely mistake these for their common nouns in context, and Japanese is similar. I also, personally, don’t necessarily associate someone named Faith directly with the meaning of the word Faith – Faith is a word that identifies that person, and may or may not have anything to do with the meaning. Japanese names are similar – people aren’t going to be thinking of Manami as “love ocean”, they will just think of her as Manami.