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Everyone has agreed upon that Japanese has three sets of characters -
hiragana, katakana, and kanji.

Yet the Latin alphabet is considered to be one character set, even though the
capitals and lowercase letters differ just as much as the two kana.

Why is this the case?
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2019-05-25T17:47:34.483
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2019-05-26T08:30:12.083
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question
katakana hiragana kana written-language
Why is katakana considered its own character set while the Latin capital letters aren't?
**(1)** First of all, Japanese uses **5** separate scripts, not 3. They are:

>   * Hiragana
>   * Katakana
>   * Kanji
>   * Romaji
>   * Arabic Numerals
>

All of these scripts are used frequently in Japanese, so it is not correct to
say it only uses 3 scripts.

**(2)** Secondly, you ask why romaji are not considered to be two separate
scripts since they have upper case and lower case. You imply that
hiragana/katakana are analogous to upper case/lower case, but this is also
incorrect. The upper case and lower case variants of alphabet letters are
known as allographs [(see here for more
details)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allography). This means that they are
simply variants of the same letter. In contrast, although hiragana and
katakana may represent the same phonemic sounds, they have distinctly
different characteristics. For example, Hiragana are used to represent verbal
inflections whereas Katakana do not. Katakana are used to represent loan words
in Japanese, whereas Hiragana are not. In short, there are many important
linguistic differences between the two scripts and since they have these
different functions, they are not considered to be just variants of the same
symbols (as is the case with upper case/lower case).
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answer
The question would be difficult to reach an answer because there is no other
similar case, to my knowledge, commonly using two distinct set of letters that
have equivalent phonetic values outside those bicameral writing systems and
Japanese. In both cases, relationship between sets are conventionally and
discretely defined, not such that a general ground has been established.

In defense of this traditional idea about hiragana and katakana, I can at
least say that they are different in graphical origin. Though they both derive
from kanji, [hiragana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana) is made from
whole-character cursive forms, while
[katakana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana) taken from partial forms of
kanji. All other systems where multiple styles might be mixed, including Latin
alphabet, [Georgian alphabet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_scripts)
and [Chinese
characters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#History), are
historically unilinear i.e. one style developed into another and so on. In
this sense, [German before
WWII](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua%E2%80%93Fraktur_dispute) might be
qualified to be a mixed digraphia in a certain degree, but they share the same
graphical origin. A more accurate analogy to hiragana and katakana is letters
in [Coptic alphabet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_alphabet), which are
from Greek and Demotic, two separate descents of Hieroglyph, except that they
merged both sets into one rather than keeping two tracks.

Note that although hiragana and katakana have been standardized to be almost
parallel in the 19th century like the way they are now, their difference was
historically much more substantial. The set of currently called hiragana was
far bigger than katakana due to homophonous variants
([変体仮名](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A4%89%E4%BD%93%E4%BB%AE%E5%90%8D));
they had different collection of orthographic ligatures
([合略仮名](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%90%88%E7%95%A5%E4%BB%AE%E5%90%8D))
because of graphical difference; they were used in distinct social settings
and not usually mixed together.
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answer