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My students ask a lot of good questions. And one that sent us off on a bit of a tangent a few weeks ago was:

�How old is Japanese writing?�

Thatd make a good blog post, I thought (after we talked about it a bit).

So, let�s take a whistle-stop tour of Japanese history with a very brief introduction to Japanese writing systems!

Until the 1st or 2nd century, Japan had no writing system. Then, sometime before 500AD, kanji - Chinese characters - made its way to Japan from China (probably via Korea).

These characters were originally used for their meaning only - they werent used to write native Japanese words.

But it was inconvenient not being able to write native Japanese words down, and so people began to use kanji to represent the phonetic sounds of Japanese words, not only the meaning. This is called manyougana and is the oldest native Japanese writing system.

For example, in manyougana the word asa (morning) was written ?? (thats a kanji for the a sound - ? - and another for the sa sound - ?). In modern Japanese wed use ?, the kanji that means "morning" for asa.

Problem was, manyougana used multiple kanji for each phonetic sound - over 900 characters for the 90 phonetic sounds in Japanese - so it was inefficient and time-consuming.

Gradually, people began to simplify kanji characters into simpler characters - thats where hiragana and katakana came from.

Katakana means "broken kana" or "fragmented characters". It was developed by monks in the 9th century who were annotating Chinese texts so that Japanese people could read them. So katakana was really an early form of shorthand.

Each katakana character comes from part of a kanji: for example, the top half of ? became katakana ? (ro), the left side of ? became katakana ? (ka).



Women in Japan, on the other hand, wrote in cursive script, which was gradually simplified into hiragana. Thats why hiragana looks all loopy and squiggly. Like katakana, hiragana characters dont have meaning - they just indicate sound.