Kaixo!
On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 05:31:42PM -0700, Mark Williamson wrote:
In addition there was the old practice in Japanese of writing a neologism descriptively in Chinese characters, and writing the pronunciation (usually from English or French) right above it.
A more problematic issue would be proper nouns, like place names or country names; while some of them (those in the area of influence of Chinese, eg: Vietnam, Thailand, China, Mongolia, Corea, Japan, etc) are identiqual in both Chinese and Japanese (at least in classical writting), others are not, for example in Chinese USA is the "beauty-country" while in Japanese it is the "rice-country"; France is in Chinese represented by the hanzi meaning "law", while in Japanese the hanzi for "Buddha" is used instead, etc.