Hiragana & Katakana

平仮名 (ひらがな)

Hiragana syllables developed from Chinese characters, as shown below. Hiragana were originally called onnade or ‘women’s hand’ as were used mainly by women – men wrote in kanji and katakana. By the 10th century, hiragana were used by everybody. The word hiragana means “oridinary syllabic script”.The hiragana syllabary consists of 48 syllables and is mainly used to write word endings, known as okurigana in Japanese. Hiragana are also widely used in materials for children, textbooks, animation and comic books, to write Japanese words which are not normally written with kanji, such as adverbs and some nouns and adjectives, or for words whose kanji are obscure or obselete.

 

片仮名  (カタカナ)

The katakana syllabary was derived from abbreviated Chinese characters used by Buddhist monks to indicate the correct pronunciations of Chinese texts in the 9th century. At first there were many different symbols to represent one syllable of spoken Japanese, but over the years the system was streamlined. By the 14th century, there was a more or less one-to-one correspondence between spoken and written syllables. The word katakana “part (of kanji) syllabic script”. The “part” refers to the fact that katakana characters represent parts of kanji.

The katakana syllabary consists of 48 syllables and was originally considered “men’s writing”. Since the 20th century, katakana have been used mainly to write non-Chinese loan words, onomatopoeic words, foreign names, in telegrams and for emphasis (the equivalent of bold, italic or upper case text in English). Before the 20th century all foreign loanwords were written with kanji.  Katakana are also used to writ Ainu, a language spoken on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaid