East Asian Writing Systems

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Annai

Annai refers to the giving of directions or information. Because it is a service, it is most often seen in the honorific form go-annai out of politeness and respect towards the customer.

Annai is a Chinese compound (on-reading) that is normally written in the Chinese characters 案内, as seen below:


Go-annai
Odakyū Hyakkaten

Information
Odakyu Department Store
Koin rokkaa
Annai-sho

Coin-operated lockers
Information

Somewhat surprisingly, go-annai can also be seen in hiragana, as ごあんない:


Odakyū noriba annai
Odakyu platform information

Keiō Shinjuku eki
Go-annai
Keio Shinjuku Station
Information

By dispensing with Chinese characters, which have a certain stiff, official air about them, hiragana presumably makes the information desks less forbidding and more approachable to customers.

A Google search in August 2003 revealed the following pattern of usage on the Internet:

Form
No. of occurrences
ご案内
6,400,000
御案内
550,000
ごあんない
146,000

The overwhelmingly prevalent form is ご案内, with the honorific go- in hiragana and annai in characters. There is still, however, a minority tendency to write go- in characters as 御, a hangover from older days when kanji usage was much more prevalent. The hiragana form ごあんない that we saw above is found only in a small minority of cases.

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