5

I found here that 涙 is a semasio-phonetic character (形声文字) while 泪 is a more visual version. Apart from that no big differences should be between this two ways of writing "namida". Anyway I would like to be sure of that.

Thank you very much!

Edit: I searched 泪 on google. Although the results are mostly in Chinese there are also results in Japanese. See for example here.

| improve this question | |
  • The difference is you will never see the latter in Japanese. Your first hint should be a google search which returns pages and pages of Chinese. – kiss-o-matic Mar 8 '16 at 21:21
  • thank you for your comment. Actually I searched it on google. If you do a quick search with a hiragana on it you will see that it is used in japanese as well. – Strabo Mar 8 '16 at 22:00
  • 2
    @kiss-o-matic But I have seen 泪 in Japanese, more than once. It's definitely much less frequent, however. – snailplane♦ Mar 8 '16 at 22:04
  • "never" was a bit of an exaggeration and I admit, it's lost in the nature of message boards. – kiss-o-matic Mar 9 '16 at 16:25
5

涙 is 常用漢字 but 泪 is not. Today 泪 is only seen in lyrics, poetry and such. One answer in the chiebukuro question you linked says 「泪の方が演歌っぽい」, which I think best describes the actual difference in usage.

| improve this answer | |
2

There is apparently also a third character for this reading, 涕. I'm not aware of any differences in meaning between the three, but in my own reading, I've only ever run across the 涙 spelling.

UPDATE:

Be sure to read the comments from snailboat -- the additional data should paint a clearer picture of the relative occurrences of these different spellings.

| improve this answer | |
  • 5
    In various web-based corpora, I found that the ratio is something like 100:1 for 涙 to 泪, and 1000:1 for 涙 to 涕, but I'd actually expect those ratios to be greater if they only included modern usage. I think the corpus results must also include some pre-war orthography. Personally, I've only seen 泪 a few times, I think mostly in song titles and lyrics where people are deliberately using the "non-standard" choice of kanji, but I think I've seen it in fiction writing at least once. (I didn't put it in my notes, so I'm not sure.) – snailplane♦ Mar 8 '16 at 22:45
  • Useful additional data, thank you @snailboat! – Eiríkr Útlendi Mar 8 '16 at 22:48

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.