Scripts and Shapes: the Interplay of Chinese Characters and Japanese Syllabaries in Early Modern Japan1

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SCRIPTS AND SHAPES: THE INTERPLAY OF CHINESE CHARACTERS AND JAPANESE SYLLABARIES IN EARLY MODERN JAPAN1 Margarita Winkel Adoption and Adaptation of Chinese Writing in Japan The Japanese writing system is based on Chinese characters. The semantic and phonetic qualities of Chinese characters resulted in two methods of adopting the Chinese system of writing. Chinese characters (called kanji in Japanese) were used either for their meaning or for their phonetic value. The Japanese, besides usingkanji , also developed syllabic scripts, called kana. Kana are abbreviated forms of Chinese characters that represent specific sounds. There are two forms of kana; hiragana and katakana. The hiragana syllabary is a cursive form of the original character, while katakana is a part of the character. The borrowing of Chinese characters for writing Japanese is thought to have started as early as the third century ce. The development of kana was probably some centuries later.2 Modern Japanese writing uses a combination of kanji and kana, resulting in a style called kanjikana-majiribun (mixed kana/kanji). Chinese characters are now used almost exclusively for their meaning – and may have alternative ways of pronunciation. Hiragana are mainly used to indicate verbal endings and grammatical markers. Katakana is generally used to write non-Chinese loan words, onomatopoeic words or words from dialects, foreign names, and for emphasis. There were originally 48 signs representing Japanese syllables. These were derived from various Chinese characters. At the beginning of the twentieth century the government standardized the kana. The following list (ill. 1) shows 46 kana (two are now obsolete) in their modern, standard form, together with the characters from which they originated. From this list 1 I am very grateful to Jeroen Wiedenhof, who has ‘dissected’ the illustrations used in this article in a way I could not have done by myself. I also like to thank the editor and anonymous readers for their helpful comments. 2 For general information on Japanese scripts and writing, see O’Neill, P. G. & S. Yanada (1987) An Introduction to Written Japanese, Seeley (1991) A History of Writing in Japan. 28 margarita winkel Illustration 1: Hiragana, katakana and their original characters. it is clear that the majority of modern hiragana and katakana have been derived from the same characters. Since hiragana is a cursive form of the original character and katakana employs a part of the original, the results are obviously different. The following table (ill. 2) shows how the hiragana and katakana forms of the first ten sounds of the syllable system relate to the character they were derived from.3 3 For a full overview of the 48 kana, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hiragana_ origin.svg and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Katakana_origine.svg. The examples in illustration 2 are adopted from those charts..

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