Quick Facts Type Logophonetic Genealogy sinitic Location East Asia Time 5th Century CE to Present Direction Top to Bottom

The Japanese writing system is an interesting mixture of innovation and tradition. It combines a set of Chinese logograms and two Chinese-derived syllabaries into a complex logosyllabic system.

Writing came to Japan from China during the 5th century CE. The first Japanese texts were written in Chinese characters (kanji), a system called kanbun (which simply means "Chinese Writing"). However, writing in Chinese became very awkward as the grammatical syntax of the Japanese language is considerably different from Chinese. The solution to this problem is to keep the Chinese characters but use Japanese grammar.

The next problem is that Chinese is an isolating language, which led to a writing system where each sign represented a morpheme. The Japanese language, on the other hand, has inflected verbs and post-positions, requiring appending suffixes and particles to words and clauses in a sentence. So, in order to represent these extra grammatical units, the Japanese scribes used certain Chinese characters for their sound values. This means that the system was ambiguous, as it's hard to tell whether a character is to be interpreted as a logogram or a syllabogram.

This ambiguous system eventually led to a change in the graphical representation of the syllabograms. The Chinese characters used to write out sounds were visually simplified and made distinct from the Chinese characters used as logograms. This new system is called kana.

The Two Kana Systems

A syllabic grapheme in the Japanese writing system is called a kana. There are two sets of kanas, namely, hiragana, and katakana.

Hiragana is used to write native Japanese words. Its origin lies in the early literary works which used Chinese characters completely for their phonetic values at the 8th century CE. This system is called the manyogana, from the anthological work "Manyoshu". Eventually the signs were reduced in number and simplified into sogana, and then finally into hiragana.

At first, hiragana was scorned by literate men as Chinese was the "cultured" language. Women, on the other hand, use hiragana primarily since they were not allowed to learn the Chinese characters. This culminated in the Tale of Genji, the world's first novel written by Lady Murasaki Shikibu during the Heian era (795-1192). However, this gender-based segregation of literacy eventually dissolved and hiragana was became an accepted literary script.

The following is the hiragana syllabary:

The second Japanese syllabary is called katakana, which has its origin as a pronunciation aid for Chinese Buddhist scriptures. It then became used for suffixes, particles, postpositions, etc. along with kanji used for word roots.

In modern times, it has come to use write non-Chinese loan words.

Some note regarding how some syllabograms actually sound (in both hiragana and katakana):

Sign		Phonetic value		Transcribed as
し (si)		ši		shi
ち (ti)		či		chi
つ (tu)		tsu		tsu
ふ (hu)		Φu		fu

In additional to the basic signs, several diacritic marks are used to change the quality of the consonants. Two diagonal dashes placed on the upper right corner of a sign starting with /k/, /s/, or /t/ turns the voiceless consonant into a voiced one. (I'm using hiragana for all examples, but the same rules apply to katakana as well.)

A special case occurs with the /h/ series. A small circle on the upper right turns the consonant to /p/, where as the double-diagonal-dash mark changes the consonant to /b/.

Also, to write palatal sounds like /kyo/ in Kyoto, the convention is to use the -i sign with the desired consonant, followed by a sign from the /y/ series. The /y/ sign is written in a smaller size to distinguish it from a fully syllabic sign.

It is possible to have a double consonant in Japanese, like /kk/, /ss/, /tt/, and /pp/. The first of the double consonant is always represented using a smaller /tsu/ sign.

And finally, Japanese also has long vowels, such as /aa/, /ee/, /ii/, /oo/, /uu/. The way they are written in hiragana is actually different from the way in katakana. In hiragana, long vowels is indicated by using the syllabogram with the matching vowel from the vowel-only series. So /yuu/ is be written as /yu/ followed by /u/. On the other hand, in katakana, a horizontal line is used for all vowels to mark that it's long.

Chinese Characters: Kanji

In addition to the kanas, modern Japanese writing contains about a thousand Chinese characters, or kanji, to write words (both native Japanese and Chinese loans). Often times, Japanese names (personal, geographical, etc) are written completely in kanji. For example, Tokyo is always written as , instead of . Also, some words (both Japanese and Chinese loans) would be written as kanji as well.

In the following example, "gakusei" is kanji, while everything else is hiragana. Also note that the particle /wa/ is written with the syllabogram /ha/. This is due to historical reasons and one of the few irregular forms in the writing system.

If you pick up a Japanese newspaper, you'll probably see all three writing systems represented.