Japanese Language: Origins of the Chinese Script and Kana
On and kun readings
In Japanese, Chinese characters (kanji, literally, “Han letters”) are read in several different ways, which famously makes life difficult for learners of Japanese. The main two pronunciations are the “on” (Chinese-style) reading and the “kun” (Japanese-style) reading. However, as a result of the complicated history of character pronunciation in Japan, many kanji have more than one “on” reading. In early times, Buddhist monks popularized the so-called Wu reading (J. go-on), or the pronunciation in use in the south-eastern Chinese kingdom of Wu. In the 7th and 8th centuries, the kan-on (“Han” pronunciation) reading, which was in use in the area of the Tang capital Chang’an, was introduced, and after the 13th century the so-called tō-on (“Tang” reading) was introduced. Because they were associated to specific areas of knowledge, ways of pronouncing and reading kanji were never standardized and, still today, Wu readings are used for Buddhist terminology, Han readings are common in legal language, and so forth. For example, the character 経 can be read kyō (go-on), kei (kan-on), and kin (tō-on) in different contexts; the character 行 can be read gyō (go-on), kō (kan-on), and an (tō-on).Because Japan did not have its own writing system, there was no choice but to use the Chinese script. Even texts that dealt with Japan were written in Chinese (by translating them first into Chinese), but naturally there was also a desire to record the Japanese language as it was. This was achieved by using Chinese characters sometimes for their meaning (e.g. 山 = mountain) and sometimes for their sound, to represent the sounds of the Japanese language according to both their “on” and “kun” readings.

和我屋度能 伊佐左村竹 布久風能 於等能可蘇気伎 許能由布敝可母
This string of characters is read: wa ga yado no / isasa muratake / fuku kaze no / oto no kasokeki / kono yūbe kamo (By my house / the bamboo grows in little clusters, / softly the leaves rustle / as the wind rises / on this quiet evening). Most of the characters are used phonetically according to the “one character per sound” principle, except for 村竹 (muratake) and 風 (kaze), which are read according to the kun reading. Thus, a method to write down the Japanese language was devised. However, because of the characteristics of the Japanese language, with this method sentences tended to become very long, and some of the characters were too elaborate as representations of single phonemes, making reading, and especially writing, too time-consuming. The hiragana and katakana syllabaries were developed as solutions to these problems.Hiragana and katakana syllabaries
The hiragana letters are simplified or cursivized Chinese characters: the graphあ (a) is a simplification of the character 安; the graphい (i) is a simplification of 以; う (u) is a simplification of宇;お([o]) derives from 於, and so forth. By contrast, katakana graphs were created by taking elements or parts of Chinese characters. For example, the graph ア (a) is the left-hand part of the character 阿, the graph イ(i) is the left-hand part of the character 伊, the graph ウ(u) is the crown of 宇, the graph エ(e) is the right-hand part of the character 江, and the graph オ(o) is the left-hand part of the character 於. If we place the hiragana and katakana graphs next to the original Chinese characters, we can clearly see that, in both cases, the aim was to create a simplified phonetic script:Hiragana chart



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