LinguistCat wrote: ↑12 Feb 2018 22:31
ixals wrote: ↑12 Feb 2018 17:25
WeepingElf wrote: ↑12 Feb 2018 17:13
All4Ɇn wrote: ↑12 Feb 2018 16:37
How, if at all, are vulgar characters taught in Chinese and Japanese schools?
What are "vulgar characters"?
I would guess and say characters for vulgar words. "Fuck", "shit", "pussy" etc? They probably have their own characters but I can't see a school teaching characters like these. So I'd be curious to how this is done in schools!
I wouldn't know about Chinese at all and I don't know about Japanese schooling, but aren't most of these words written in kana in Japanese anyway?
To my understanding, Japanese doesn't really have swearwords. While there are words that could be considered vulgar, I don't believe any of them have the same strength or taboo as swearwords do in English. The closest equivalent to a swearword that I know of would be the word "kuso", which seems to have originally meant "feces" (and is probably still used in this sense, like "shit" in English), but is frequently used with a meaning similar to "damn" or "dammit". It's usually written in kana as くそ or クソ, but it can also be written with the kanji 糞. I don't believe that the character 糞 itself is vulgar, though. I'm not even sure that the word kuso is truly vulgar, since it appears in compound words like 糞虫
kusomushi "dung beetle".
Chinese, on the other hand, definitely has vulgar taboo words. Two that come to mind are 肏 cào "fuck" and 屄 bī "cunt". Not only are the words themselves obviously very vulgar, but the characters used to represent them are very suggestive: 肏 is composed of 入 "to enter" and 肉 "meat; flesh", and 屄 is composed of 尸 "body" and 穴 "hole". I don't know how these characters are treated in public education, but I doubt that they are taught at all. Even in casual writing, the actual characters I just gave for these words are rarely used. Instead, another character that is phonetically the same or similar is typically used euphemistically. Cào is often written with 操 cāo "to operate". Bī is often written with its one common homophone, 逼 bī "to compel".
Again, I don't know for certain the answer to All4En's question, but my guess would be that they simply aren't.