How it began
Chinese ideograms, known in Japan as kanji, were introduced in the 5th century. Because Japanese differs substantially from Chinese, Japanese scholars experimented with adaptations of Chinese writing. One was man'yogana, a phonetic syllabary that came into use in the 8th century. In the 9th century man'yogana was simplified, giving rise to the two syllabic sets, hiragana and katakana. Katakana, angular in appearance, developed from the abbreviation of Chinese characters. Hiragana, rounded in appearance, came from simplifying the cursive grass style of writing.
Before it existed
Before kana, Japanese was written with Chinese characters alone. Chinese lacks characters that correspond to Japanese grammatical particles such as wa, ga and ni, and kanji cannot express the inflected forms of Japanese. Man'yogana worked around this by using Chinese characters whose pronunciation resembled Japanese syllables, ignoring the ideas the characters stood for.
How it works
Each kana syllabary has 46 basic symbols. The first five represent the vowels a, i, u, e and o, the next 40 represent a consonant followed by a vowel, and the last represents a final n. Two small strokes or a tiny circle added at the upper right of 20 of the symbols produce 25 more sounds, so that ka becomes ga and fu becomes bu or pu. Together the symbols allow full phonetic transcription of Japanese.
What changed first
According to Britannica, people who received literacy training first learned the flowing hiragana. Those who went on to become scribes or court writers then learned the more squared katakana, which was used for official documents and religious texts. Hiragana came to be used for more casual purposes such as poetry, personal communication and literature.
What lasted
Variations of the two syllabaries developed over the centuries and attempts were made to standardize them. The Buddhist priest Gyoa compiled a dictionary of kana spellings in the late 14th century, and the priest Keichu produced a work on kana usage in 1693 that remained the definitive source until the early 20th century. In the 1900s the government began standardizing the writing system, including the shape of the kana characters.
Where it stands today
Modern Japanese is written with kanji, hiragana and katakana together. Kanji are used for content words and hiragana for particles and inflectional endings. Katakana is used mainly for words borrowed from other languages and for scientific terms. Britannica notes that hiragana is also the script used in Japanese calligraphy.
