Ben ... je ne suis pas si sûre que la question soit dénuée de sens. Car les 'frères ennemis' ont culturellemeent bcp de choses en commun même si l'histoire contemporaine les a déchirés.
Attn je ne suis pas en train de dire que la culture japonaise découle de la culture chinoise - loin de là !
J'ai l'impression que quand on soulève ce genre de questions, les 'japonisants' sortent tout de suite les arguments de la différence et de l'évolution séparée - ce dont je suis tout à fait convaincue : là n'est pas mon propos.
Par contre je serais bien curieuse de savoir comment certains caractères simplifiés de manière assez importante se sont retrouvés simplifiés à l'identique dans les 2 cas. Je pense que si les deux environnements étaient en système clos peut-être que les résultas auraient été différents.
Ca m'est difficile de penser qu'il n'y pas de lien du tout ... . Opinion personnelle bien sûr.
J'ai fait qq recherches et j'ai trouvé qu'à priori les premières simplifications importantes au Japon seraient antérieures (fin 2° guerre mondiale) à celles de RPC (années 50 et +).
J'ai trouvé des éléments très interessants mais rien qui parle d'un éventuel lien entre les deux : mais de toute façon même s'il y en avait un, je pense que ça n'intéresse ni les uns ni les autres de le reconnaitre ... .
je n'ai pas trop le temp de chercher plus mais si qqn a des éléments. ce serait amusant de savoir que les chinois se sont en partie inspirés des kanjis simplifiés pour mener leur propre simplification !
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Voici qq infos que les spécialistes du japonais doivent très bien connaître mais pour les autres c'est peut-être intéressant :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji
Types of kanji: categorized by history
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Kokuji
While some kanji and Chinese hanzi are mutually readable, many more are not. In addition to characters that have different meanings in Japanese, and characters that have identical meanings but are written differently, there are also characters peculiar to Japan known as kokuji (国字; literally "national characters"). Kokuji are also known as wasei kanji (和製漢字; lit. "Chinese characters made in Japan"). There are hundreds of kokuji (see the sci.lang.japan AFAQ list), and although some are rarely used, many others have become important additions to the written Japanese language. These include:
峠 tōge (mountain pass)
榊 sakaki (sakaki tree, genus Camellia)
畑 hatake (field of crops)
辻 tsuji (crossroads, street)
働 dō, hatara(ku) (work)
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Kokkun
In addition to kokuji, there are kanji that have been given meanings in Japanese different from their original Chinese meanings. These kanji are not considered kokuji but are instead called kokkun (国訓) and include characters such as:
沖 oki (offing, offshore; Ch. chōng rinse)
森 mori (forest; Ch. sēn gloomy, majestic, luxuriant growth)
椿 tsubaki (Camellia japonicus; Ch. chūn Ailantus)
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Old characters and new characters
The same kanji character can sometimes be written in two different ways, 旧字体 (kyū-jitai; lit. "old character") (舊字體 in kyū-jitai) and 新字体 (shin-jitai; "new character"). The following are some examples of kyū-jitai followed by the corresponding shin-jitai:
國 国 kuni (country)
號 号 gō (number)
變 変 hen, ka(waru) (change)
Kyū-jitai were used before the end of World War II, and are mostly, if not completely, the same as the Traditional Chinese characters. After the war the government introduced the simplified shin-jitai. Some of the new characters are similar to simplified characters used in the People's Republic of China. Also, like the simplification process in China, some of the shinjitai were once abbreviated forms (略字 ryakuji) used in handwriting, but in contrast with the "proper" unsimplified characters (正字 seiji) were only acceptable in colloquial contexts. This page [1] shows examples of these handwritten abbreviations, identical to their modern shinjitai forms, from the postwar era. There are also handwritten simplifications today that are significantly simpler than their standard forms (either untouched or received only minor simplification in the post-war reforms), examples of which can be seen here [2], but despite their wide usage and popularity, they, like their postwar counterparts, are not considered socially acceptable and are only used in handwriting.
Some Chinese characters are only used phonetically in Japanese (当て字 ateji), and many Chinese characters are not used in Japanese at all. Theoretically, however, any Chinese character can also be a Japanese character—the Daikanwa Jiten, one of the largest dictionaries of kanji ever compiled, has about 50,000 entries, even though most of the entries have never been used in Japanese
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http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writsys/writjpn.html
CHINESE CHARACTERS (KANJI)
An obvious and frequently-asked question is: Are the characters used in Japan the same as those used in China?
The short answer is yes. Chinese characters used by the Japanese derive from the same tradition as the Chinese, namely, the characters of the Classical language. In the same way that almost any English word is fair game for adoption into Japanese, virtually the entire corpus of traditional Chinese characters can theoretically be used.
However, anyone familiar with the two languages quickly realises that there are differences in the characters used. The main ones are:
Number of characters in use: First, Japanese uses fewer characters than Chinese. While the Japanese adopted much Chinese vocabulary, they did not adopt everything. When they decided to restrict the number of kanji in use after the war, they were able to settle on 1,850 characters (since increased to 1,945) without undue problems. Even though many writers and academics find this number too restrictive and use some non-approved characters, the total number still does not come near the 3,000-4,000 minimum needed to function in Chinese. Japanese are aided by the fact that they can fall back on hiragana or katakana to write their language, unlike the Chinese who virtually use only characters.
Non-classical characters in Chinese: Chinese contains some characters that have been specifically created for post-Classical Chinese words. For instance, zhao3 'look for' and ling4 'other' are relatively speaking fairly modern characters used to represent post-Classical vocabulary. They are not normally used in Japanese.
Japanese characters (kokuji): Where the Japanese could not find an appropriate Chinese character to represent a Japanese word, they often created their own. Such characters are known as kokuji ('national characters') and a few have been included in the list of approved characters. Interestingly, the Chinese regard kokuji as part of the greater family of Chinese characters and include them in the larger, more comprehensive Chinese character dictionaries. Some examples:
Character Usage
komu 'to be packed'
komeru 'to put into, be included', 'to load', 'concentrate on'
tsuji 'crossroads', personal name
hataraku 'work'
roodoo 'labour'
Standardisation of alternative forms: Many Chinese characters have several alternative forms. The Chinese and Japanese sometimes decided on different standard forms, e.g., the character for 'receive', which is in Chinese and in Japanese (the Chinese contains an extra stroke).
Simplification: The simplification of characters after WWII in Japan and in the 1950s in China gave rise to divergences between the traditional characters (still used in Hong Kong and Taiwan), China's simplified characters, and Japan's simplified kanji. A Japanese character will sometimes be the same as the traditional form, sometimes the same as the Mainland form, sometimes the same as both, and sometimes different from both (see table below). In general, the simplification of characters in Japan was relatively mild compared to the drastic simplification on the Mainland.
Traditional Chinese Simplified Chinese Japanese Meaning Comment
'house, home' Not simplified
'country, nation' Simplified the same way in Mainland China and Japan
'space, between' Simplified in Mainland China but not Japan
'Buddha' Simplified in Japan but not Mainland China (uncommon)
'to transmit, story' Simplified differently in Mainland China and Japan
Substitution of characters: In simplifying the characters the Japanese also restricted the number to be used, disallowing the use of some characters in education and the media. In order to follow these restrictions, abolished characters are either written in hiragana or replaced with a different character of similar meaning. This results in some less-than-satisfactory compromises.
Original Characters Meaning Pronunciation Substitution of hiragana Substitution of different character
'concealment, hiding' inpei --
'alteration, tampering' kaizan --
'ulceration, decomposition' furan
'carriage, car' sharyoo -
In such cases, the abolished character is present in spirit but not in form, like a 'ghost limb' that has been amputated but feels as though it is still there. Since hiragana are normally used to write verb endings, substituting hiragana for characters can be confusing. For instance, furan looks as though it should be read kusaran, a literary or dialect pronunciation meaning 'not rot' -- the exact opposite of furan! Moreover, replacing the disallowed character ran 'soft, rot, fester, messy' with the approved character ran 'be confused, in chaos' results in some loss of meaning. 'Rotten and festering' is more accurate than 'rotten and confused'.
Differences in the meanings of characters: Partly due to changes in meaning on both sides, some characters have different meanings in Chinese and Japanese. To take a simple example, the verb zou3 meant 'to run' in Classical Chinese. It still does in Japanese as hashiru, but the meaning has changed to 'to go' in modern Mandarin. From the Chinese point of view, the Japanese usage has a quaint Classical feel to it.
READINGS:
When the Japanese borrowed Chinese characters, the aspect that was to have the most far-reaching consequence was the fact that they were used for both:
Words (or forms) borrowed from Chinese -- the character was borrowed with its pronunciation and meaning intact.
Native Japanese words -- characters came to be identified with the native word having the closest meaning.
This results in the most striking feature of Chinese characters in Japanese, i.e., the fact that most of them can be read in at least two ways, one known as the on reading, the other as the kun reading. This is a key concept in understanding the structure of the modern Japanese vocabulary.
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