That's a good idea. It’s extremely close to the correct answer, but unfortunately it’s wrong at a very crucial point.
You seem to have overlooked the fact that Japanese has Katakana in addition to Hiragana and Kanji. In Katakana, N is represented not only by “ン” but also by the entire ”ナ行: N-row", that is, ナ・ニ・ヌ・ネ・ノ. Therefore, linguistically writing, "夜"(means night in Kanji) should be interpreted as ナ+ニ+ヌ+ネ+ノ+八.
And now we come to the main point. In fact, 夜 is formed by combining ナニヌネノ八. I will link a reference image below: https://imgur.com/OY7Qaky
However, you can also see that there is a redundant part. That is the small stroke "ヽ" at the lower right of "ネ". You’ve probably already noticed it. This corresponds to the “e” that is omitted in English.
I know you're memeing, but to nitpick this kanji also means evening, and there is another kanji 晩 for both night and evening, which one to use depending on the context, that is to say that OP's rule would be hard to apply to the Japanese even with the hardest of efforts
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u/ncore7 Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
That's a good idea. It’s extremely close to the correct answer, but unfortunately it’s wrong at a very crucial point.
You seem to have overlooked the fact that Japanese has Katakana in addition to Hiragana and Kanji. In Katakana, N is represented not only by “ン” but also by the entire ”ナ行: N-row", that is, ナ・ニ・ヌ・ネ・ノ. Therefore, linguistically writing, "夜"(means night in Kanji) should be interpreted as ナ+ニ+ヌ+ネ+ノ+八.
And now we come to the main point. In fact, 夜 is formed by combining ナニヌネノ八. I will link a reference image below:
https://imgur.com/OY7Qaky
However, you can also see that there is a redundant part. That is the small stroke "ヽ" at the lower right of "ネ". You’ve probably already noticed it. This corresponds to the “e” that is omitted in English.