I have seen untranslated Japanese sites, such as this one, which are in Japanese. I have seen periodocals in Japanese, and unlike Chinese, which have all their own thousands of symbols, seem to have somewhat of a Roman influence. Granted some of it can be attributed to “english chic”(I have seen some very odd sounding Japanese products written in english, maybe in an attempt to be exotic, but to us native speakers just sounds weird), but I am seing a roman numerals such as A, E, f(in italics), J, B, u, ae (connected, like in older english), n, H, plus others, and a lot of symbols from the upper case of the numbers at the top. Many of the letters have hyphens on top, much like spanish to show which syllable to stress.
I find it hard to believe it is just my computer trying to translate something that it has no symbols for, because there are also symbols that are not Roman, especially the 0, which the sides are cornered into an upright rectangle.
If this is Japanese, it is certainly a modern version of it. Maybe comparable to how spoken english greatly shifted about 500 years ago.
What is up with Japanese text? When did they so greatly incorporate Roman influences? When did they incorporate stuff like %, or @ (but with a “c” in the middle)?
Sorry for the highjack, but can someone PLEASE direct me to where I can download a Japanese text display program. Every time I’ve tried to download one it never works. I can’t even find anything about it at Microsoft.
In IE6 go to tools, Internet Options, Advanced Tab. I’m not sure exactly which one it is, but you probably have something turned off, is there a check next to Enable Install On Demand (other). I’m guess that’s the one it is, but if could be something else. If it’s not checked, check it, then click on that link and see if something automatically pops up asking you if you want to download that language. Otherwise you could go to the mircosoft update page (Click on Tools, then Windows Update, under one of the headings you should find some language packs, download the approprate ones.
In Windows, you have to enable East Asian languages via the “Regional and Language Options” in the Control Panel. Be forewarned, you will probably need your Windows CD to install files from.
Once you’ve done that, you should be able to view Japanese web pages alright. A word of warning, though: Japanese sites are just as careless with failing to set the character set encoding as most Western sites. Consequently, you may have to manually set the encoding for each page (in IE, View | Encoding, with Shift_JIS being the most commonly used Japanese encoding) or move Japanese up in the list of default languages (in IE, Tools | Internet options | Language button).
Damn. There are no regional and language options in my control panel, Install on Demand begins to work but then fails with the download, and the windows update page is trying to scan my computer for updates, but remains on 0% after fifteen minutes. My conclusion is that my Windows 98 must be obsolete and I’ll have to learn Japanese some other way.
Like others have said, what you are seeing is not Japanese but rather your computer freeking out because it doesn’t have Japanese fonts installed. On my computer, the only roman characters I see are the words “Budweiser”, “Coors”, “Miller” and “Miller Genuine Draft”.
What you are witnessing is fairly common because, as Cerowyn said, web designers are pretty lazy about indicating encoding format. In Japanese, the gibberish you see is called “moji-bake”.
If you ever get to see some actual Japanes text, you will find 4 types of scripts in common usage:
Latin Letters (called romanji in Japanese): Lots of English and other foreign words are just spelled out in the Latin alphabet that you I are using to post in this thread.
Kanji: These are the Chinese Characters that have been adopted as the main part of Japanese writing. It’s like we would use “#” to mean “number”.
Hiragana: Special, simplified characters that are kind of like an alphabet (actually a syllabary*) that are used to “fill out” the Kanji to fit the Japanese language. Japanese is inflected, but Chinese is not, so the Kanji takes care of the inflected part. Kind of like how you might write “#s” to mean “numbers”, where the “s” would be a hiragana. Hiragana looks a lot like Kanji, but it’s very simple and “swirly”.
Katakana: Another syllabary, with a one-to-one corrospondance to the Hiragana syllabary, but that looks more angular than hiragana. This is used mostly to spell out foreign words not written in Romanji, and that are spelled out the way a Japanese person would pronounce the foreign word. Words like Beer (Bi-ru), Hotel (Ho-te-ru), or a personal name like Mace (Me-su).
*Syllabary means each character represents a syllable. One each for: Ka, Ki, Ku, Ke, Ko; Na, Ni, Nu, Ne No; etc.