Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind

Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications

Page 172

SYLLABIC SYSTEMS OF WRITING
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In Japanese writing, ideograms are employed only to represent nouns, adjectives and verb-roots. But Japanese, unlike Chinese, is an agglutinative language, and has grammatical terminations (which are lacking in Chinese), prepositions and so forth. At first the Japanese used for this purpose Chinese ideograms having a similar sound, for instance the Chinese ideogram t'ien, "sky," pronounced in Japanese approximately ten, was used for the termination -te. This device proved too cumbersome; as a consequence, the syllabaries were created.
JAPANESE SYLLABIC SCRIPTS
During the eighth and ninth centuries A.D. there came into use in Japan a special syllabic system of writing called kana (perhaps from kanna, kari na, "borrowed names"), in two forms (Fig. 90): (1) kata kana or yamato ("Japanese") gana, used mainly in learned works, official documents and for the transliteration of personal names, especially of Europeans; (2) hira ("plain, simple") gana, used for grammatical terminations, and similar purposes, and mainly employed in newspapers, novels, and so forth. The creation of kata kana is attributed to Kibi(no) Mabi or Kibi daijin ("minister" Kibi), who flourished in the middle of the eighth century A.D.; hira gana is attributed to the Buddhist abbot Kobodaishi (who is also considered to be the author of the iroha poem: see below), of the beginning of the ninth century. However, all the kana signs have developed from the Chinese characters which happened to be in most use at the time; kata kana from the k'ai-shu, hira gana from the ts'ao-shu symbols. The Chinese originals of the kana were adopted either in the Chinese language with the early Japanese pronunciation, or in the early Japanese speech (which was quite different from modern Japanese); for instance, the Chinese ideogram for "woman," ni has been introduced as the kana sign for me, "woman" in Japanese, whereas the ideogram for "three," san, has been adopted for the word san, although it appears also for mi, "three" in Japanese, and the kana signs for mi are derived from it.
As a matter of fact the kana signs should not be considered as true syllabic scripts, because a comparison with the Egyptian and the cuneiform writings is instructive-as has already been stated, they are not used as independent scripts, but only as indications of the tenses of verbs, prepositional or other grammatical variations (while the Chinese characters, kanji, continue to be employed for nouns, verbs and adjectives), or may be used as phonetic complements, written alongside the ideographs as a clue to their pronunciation. The standard form of Japanese writing is kana-majiri, ie., Chinese characters with hira gana to give the Japanese pronunciation and to supply endings, etc.; whereas shin-kata kana, that is, kata kana written alongside the Chinese characters,