Two Syllabaries, One Origin: Hiragana and Katakana Compared

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Hiragana and katakana are frequently described as a matched pair, and structurally they are: both represent the same set of roughly forty eight basic Japanese morae, both emerged in the ninth century from man'yogana, and modern Japanese text routinely mixes both scripts together with kanji in the same sentence. Their origins, though closely related, were not identical, and the difference shows in how each script looks. Hiragana developed through cursive simplification, softening and rounding a whole source character down into a single flowing shape, which is why hiragana reads as curved and connected. Katakana developed differently: rather than simplify a whole character, scribes, mostly Buddhist monks annotating the pronunciation of Chinese religious texts, took just one small fragment or component of a source character and used that fragment alone as the new sign, which is why katakana looks spare and angular by comparison, and why its own name literally means fragmentary kana. The two scripts also began with different social associations, hiragana linked early on to court women's writing, katakana to monks' and scholars' technical annotation, associations that have long since faded. What has not faded is the functional split that replaced them: modern Japanese uses hiragana for native grammatical elements and katakana chiefly for loanwords, foreign names and emphasis.