A note on Japanese Manga...

A note on Japanese Manga...
(日本のマンガについて少しメモでござる。。。）

"By the expression on your face, it looks like you want to ask (me) something, right? "

Although this has been explained in a thousand places elsewhere (and I'll be moving this post back to nihongomadness at somepoint...), the style of writing like the above can often be found in most manga out there today. The reason why I am writing about this particular quote from るろうに剣心　is that if you'll notice... 表情(ひょうじょう) has the ruby of かお instead of ひょうじょう.  かお is not a reading of 表情, but in fact the author being clever. ひょうじょう means facial expression, whereas かお simply means face... the reason for the different reading in this case is a simplification for younger readers. Older, more kanji savvy readers will skip the ruby and get the correct word. 

Other situations where this type of ruby is used is when the author wants to give a more precise meaning to a concept through the combination of two individual words.  I wonder if this is the 'strange readings' phenomena that was recently pointed out to me by someone else out there...

It really is a beautiful marraige of Kanji and Ruby(furigana). A more practical use of Ruby, as a quick aside, is for Japanese worksheets. Put tingthe English spelling over unknown vocabulary words when the kids are going from Japanese to English. But that's another post altogether.

顔射王様 out.



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And it all ties back to: My original daily life blog