ruby: phonetics only?

[murata2makoto]

3.3.1 Interlinear annotations 行间注 行间注
.... In Chinese typesetting, Chinese interlinear annotation is mainly used to indicate pronunciation or meaning.

A lot of ruby examples in Japan do not represent phonetics. For example, I have seen とも (friend) as ruby of 敵 (enemy).

Do Chinese use ruby only for representing phonetics?

[r12a]

https://w3c.github.io/clreq/#usage_of_interlinear_annotations does say

In Chinese typesetting, Chinese interlinear annotation is mainly used to indicate pronunciation or meaning.

And https://w3c.github.io/clreq/#x3-3-1-2-indicating-meaning-or-other-additional-information gives some examples. Does this answer the question, Murata-san, or were you looking for something more?

[c933103]

In Chinese text, I have only see the use of ruby for purposes other than phonetic representation in very few instances, and almost all those instance are when the author was translating rather literally from Japanese text. For the very few instances that the usage do appears in Chinese-original content, from my observation they are almost universally product of interest groups that are deeply influenced by Japanese media. Therefore I think the feature still have not become part of Chinese writing culture yet. (In fact, I would personally bet most Chinese readers would not understand what this way of writing mean, if there are no context and readers do not have extensive contact with Japanese media.

[c933103]

• Note: I have seen a boarder usage of another form of representation in trying to convey a meaning different from the literal way, but they are usually not represented with the feature of ruby or overlay onanother text, instead it is simply written like "Wo (Xie) Bu (Xie) Yao (Ni) !" in plain text (with the base text in ideography and bracketes text in romanized form, or in form of bopomofo phonetic symbol)

[murata2makoto]

Thank you, @r12a and @c933103. I recently saw this advertisement. This may also be created by those who are deeply influenced by Japanese media.

[c933103]

This example still seems like phonetic, but the shop owner applied different ateji character onto Japanese romaji based on Chinese pronunciation.

[realfish]

Actually, ruby being used for metonymic or metonym-like sake is not rare in China. See below via the Moegirlpedia. (Btw, this site is full of such use cases in other entries.)

I agree that this kind of usages is originally influenced by Japanese culture. Nowadays, not only sub-culture societies, also the mainstream media adopt such usages to enrich their expressions. Limited to the typesetting environments, however, a more often alternative annotation style is the in-text note between brackets.

[bobbytung]

@murata0204 You are right. It's from translated Japanese light novel and broadly used in several situation. So ruby annotation in Chinese is not only specified in phonetics now. Here's some examples:

萬維網Worldwide Web

ＷＷＷ萬維網

敵人朋友

敵ㄆㄥˊ人ㄧㄡˇ

敵peng人you

[murata2makoto]

Thank you so much.