hiragana

hiragana, one of two sets of syllabic Japanese script. It is the set used to write Japanese grammatical particles as well as native Japanese words whose kanji (ideogram) is either obscure or nonextant. The other set, katakana, is largely reserved for scientific terms, official documents, and words adopted from other languages. The word hiragana combines the words hira, “ordinary,” and kana, “syllabary.”

Click Here to see full-size tableThe Japanese language can be written with three different scripts: kanji, hiragana, and katakana. Kanji, which is the oldest of the three scripts, consists of Chinese ideograms (hanzi) that were introduced in Japan in the 5th century ce. But the kanji system is very complicated, consisting of tens of thousands of characters that can be combined to create additional words. Just reading a newspaper requires knowledge of some 2,000 kanji.

Hiragana and katakana, the syllabic (kana) scripts, developed over time out of linguistic necessity. Japanese differs in substantial ways from Chinese, which lacks characters that coincide with Japanese grammatical particles like wa, ga, and ni. To account for that tension, Japanese scholars experimented with adaptations to Chinese writing that conformed in various ways and degrees to the Japanese language. One such adaptation was man’yōgana, a phonetic syllabary that came into use in the 8th century. This system used Chinese characters whose Chinese pronunciation sounded similar to Japanese syllables, rather than using the ideas that the characters represented. In the 9th century man’yōgana was simplified, giving rise to the two syllabic sets, hiragana and katakana. People who received literacy training first learned the more flowing hiragana writing. Those who continued their education to become scribes or court writers then learned the more squared katakana, which was used for official documents and religious texts. Notes in hiragana are found on the back sides of official documents, suggesting that katakana was considered more formal than hiragana. Hiragana, on the other hand, came to be used for more casual purposes such as poetry, personal communication, and literature.

Hiragana is used to write words for which no kanji exist, as well as to designate parts of speech, verb tenses, particles, and grammatical endings. Hiragana can represent the five types of Japanese syllables: a lone vowel, an initial consonant + a vowel, a single consonant, a double consonant, or a consonant + y + a vowel. In this way, hiragana characters enable full phonetic transcription of Japanese. The most artistic of the scripts, hiragana is used in Japanese calligraphy. The third script, katakana, is used to write words that were borrowed from foreign languages.

Over the centuries, several variations of the two kana syllabaries developed, and attempts were made to standardize them. A dictionary of kana spellings, Kanamoji-zukai (“Usage of Kana Signs”), was compiled by Gyōa, a Buddhist priest, in the late 14th century and contained about a thousand words. Another priest, Keichu, produced the Waji shōranshō (“Corrections to Errors in Kana”) in 1693 after studying historical spelling in documents from the 8th and 9th centuries. It was the definitive source on kana spellings until the beginning of the 20th century. In the 1900s the government began standardizing the writing system, including the shape of the kana characters, and regulating the use of kanji and kana.