Question
What do you know about the Japanese script?
Solution
The Japanese had borrowed their written script from the Chinese in the sixth century.
i. However, since their language is very different from Chinese they developed two phonetic alphabets – hiragana and katakana.
ii. Hiragana is considered feminine because it was used by many women writers in the Heian period (such as Murasaki).
iii. It is written using a mixture of Chinese characters and phonetics so that the main part of the word is written with a character – for instance, in ‘going’, ‘go’ would be written with a character and the ‘ing’ in phonetics.
i. However, since their language is very different from Chinese they developed two phonetic alphabets – hiragana and katakana.
ii. Hiragana is considered feminine because it was used by many women writers in the Heian period (such as Murasaki).
iii. It is written using a mixture of Chinese characters and phonetics so that the main part of the word is written with a character – for instance, in ‘going’, ‘go’ would be written with a character and the ‘ing’ in phonetics.
iv. The existence of a phonetic syllabary meant that knowledge spread from the elites to the wider society relatively quickly.
v. In the 1880s it was suggested that Japanese develop a completely phonetic script, or adopt a European language. Neither was done.
