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Old 08-14-2005, 06:21 AM
mailotron mailotron is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2004
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Wink all that glitters is not gold

Hello,
Nice problem but text iswrtitten in chinese not in japanese;
some rather old fashioned /archaic ideograms ( those made with a lot of strokes) make me think[ i'm not a specialist] the text is from Taiwan/Hong Kong/Singapore and not from the popular republic of China. Today,Taiwan (and most of chinese people of the diaspora) still uses old way of writing ideograms and never had share the simplified ones[ less strokes/signs] used since 1949 by the PRC.

Japanese borrowed Chinese signs( known as Kanji in Japan) from the 7th century together with buddhist texts. Now,modern japanses uses around 1900 different kanjis ( around 4000 thousands before WWII)
hint : modern japaneses texts are full of smal signs called kanas ( two syllabaries systems[around fifty syllabes/system] named hiragana and /or katakana). HIRAGANA are used to adapt kanjis to the japanese grammatical system ( fully different and far more complex than the chinese one);KATAKANA are mainly used to translate words borrowed from foreign language ( english, french , portuguese, ..) and onomatopeas ( common in manga-type comics)

regards, sayonara
mailo
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