A code of dots and dashes is like the Japanese language? Well, surprisingly enough they do share a lot of similarities. In class last week, we learned a lot about how morse code developed and how it is understood. But before we dive into that, here are some things you should know about Japanese.

Japanese consists of three different alphabets: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji, which are all used simultaneously to form words and sentences. Hiragana works similarly to the English alphabet where each character (or letter) represents a sound and they are all strung together to form different words. But here’s the difference. In English, there’s spaces between different words, however in Japanese, there are no spaces at all. The letters flow together in one continuous line only being broken up by the occasional comma. This is shown in the picture to the right since there are no spaces in the text.

When I first started learning Japanese, I found it extremely challenging to differentiate certain words from each other. For example, if you were to read this phrase in English without spaces: RACECARPET it could be read as “RACECAR   PET” or “RACE   CAR   PET” or “RACE   CARPET” and it would be hard to tell which interpretation was the correct one. Examples of these three different meanings are shown below.

As we learned in class, morse code would run into similar problems if they did not incorporate spaces in the code. Since each letter comprises of a series of dots and dashes, it was pivotal that they included silence with the length of one dot after each letter so you knew when one letter stopped and the next began, otherwise you could confuse certain letters. Unfortunately, I still run into these problems when reading Japanese since, like the English example above, it can be hard to tell where one word stops and the next begins.

RACE  CARPET (a racing themed carpet)