Re: Mixed writing systems

>> As I wrote, the hiragana sillabary can be use instead of kanji when the
>> characher you want to write is to difficult. Since women of that time
>> didn't know kanji, they just replaced everything with hiragana. There is
>> no technical dificulty to do it. It is just not the common use.
>
>Don't you often find hiragana glosses in *really* tiny characters above
>kanji in manga sometimes, especially for younger readers?  I don't exactly
>have extensive experience of manga, but I do have some in the original
>language.  :-p  Granted, I have exceptionally bad eyesight, but it made me
>wonder if manga-enthusiasts ever go around with magnifying lenses.
Yes, it happens, i mentioned it earlier as "subtitle" for kanji. Those phonetic
explanations of kanji written in small hiragana(or katakana) are called
furigana. They mostly happen in:

1)Manga (especialy for children)
2)karaoke (english text also gets furigana to help people to pronounce)
3)business card, when the first name's kanji is use with an uncommon reading
4)or in any kind of text, when some realy rare kanji occures, or when a especially
unusual reading is involved.


coming back to manga, i have seen some rather exotic uses. Take this one for example.
A pilot said (writen with kanji AND hiragana) "wakatta" (i got it/understood).
This sentence carried furigana in katakana saying :"rojaa" which a phonetic
transcription of the english "roger".