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Comment by da_big_ghey | Hacker News Reader

Are they all transliterated as "Satoshi" as well, or just pronounced that way? I know absolutely nothing about Japanese, so this may be a stupid question.

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Chinese characters (In Japan they referred to as Kanji), are ideographic rather than phonetic.

This means they represent an idea (or concept?) instead of a sound. The meaning is completely divorced from the pronunciation. In Japanese each character usually has at least two 'readings' for pronunciation onyomi (chinese-origin reading) and kunyomi (Japanese reading).

But often have even more than that, and specifically with peoples names the readings some times feel completely arbitrary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Readings

Basically, there are multiple ways to get the same 'sound' from different kanji, or get a different 'sound' the same kanji.

While we are continuing this chain of pedantry, few characters are in fact ideographic. Mainly the the oldest ones. Most are "Phono-semantic" i.e. a combination of "sounds like this, but means like this".

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...

BTW I recall later Egyption hieroglyphs were not strictly ideographic either, leading up to the Phonetician alphabet. I wonder how similar that process was.

GP probably meant logographic rather than ideographic (and kanji are a logographic writing system), because they were making a comparison to phonographic writing systems.

I imagine most non-linguist nerds (myself included) would confuse the distinction between logographic writing systems and ideographs.

Same transliteration because they are read the same. Romaji (Latin characters used to phonetically transcribe Japanese words -- "Satoshi" in this case) are based on the phonetics of the word. If two words have the same pronunciation but different kanji, they'll be transcribed the same way in romaji.

This is equally true for hiragana and katakana (the other two Japanese writing systems, which are phonetic) and all the names would be written as さとし in hiragana.

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