3987
Why are there kanji, hiragana and katakana? Is there a logical reason behind
this or just tradition?
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-13T18:46:01.300
3984
2023-05-10T16:31:43.790
2011-12-25T23:18:07.307
952
question
kanji hiragana katakana orthography
Why are there 3 ways of writing in Japanese?
As far as I know, Hiragana is for normal Japanese words, Katakana is for
foreign words such as: 'pizza' and 'hamburger'. Kanji is a symbol for a word,
in a way it simplifies writing and doesn't cause confusion.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-13T19:09:31.453
3985
2011-12-13T19:09:31.453
947
3984
answer
There are no alphabets in Japanese. For a detailed explanation check wiki,
though there are probably tons of writing on this subject.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing>
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-13T19:25:53.553
3986
2011-12-13T19:25:53.553
706
3984
answer
That's a good question, I used to wonder about that myself! This is what I've
found out through my own experiences:

When the Chinese brought their written language to Japan, there were only
Kanji (Literally, Chinese Characters). Unfortunately, although this kind of
ideographic writing system works perfectly for the Chinese language, the
Japanese language is structured differently. For example, in Chinese, if you
want to say something in the past tense, all you do is add the word for "past"
to the verb (it would be the equivalent if every verb in English could be put
in the past tense solely by adding '-ed' to the end of it {fall-ed, go-ed}),
and in Japanese (as in English) the actual word changes.

What the Japanese needed was a way to notate their verb changes. They
developed Hiragana and Katakana from already existing Kanji and assigned them
solely phonetic meanings. At some point Katakana came to be used for (among
other things*) foreign loan-words, but you can still see examples of Japanese
words written in Katakana (for example, on old gravestones) and loan-words
written in Hiragana (for example, you can see たばこ for tobacco).

*See link in comments below
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-13T19:38:49.307
3987
2011-12-14T03:06:41.683
2011-12-14T03:06:41.683
921
921
3984
answer
Let me reflect this back as a similar question -- why are there two alphabets
in English, upper- and lower-case? Is there any logical reason for this, or
just tradition? English can clearly be written using only one or the other.

In that context, it's worth noting that everything about language is largely
handed down to us from the past. It's very rare to find moments in history
when someone sat down and carefully thought out some aspect of a language; for
the most part, language evolves over time to suit the needs and circumstances
of its speakers. And that's also the answer for why Japanese has kanji,
hiragana, and katakana -- the kanji came first, and were borrowed from the
Chinese. It was cumbersome to use kanji to handle writing out the changing
parts of Japanese words, and so the most commonly used kanji were simplified
for those specific roles. And that's the short, probably over-simplified
answer.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-13T20:30:27.570
3988
2011-12-13T20:30:27.570
820
3984
answer
As for hiragana vs. katakana, it pretty much resembles the distinction between
upright vs. italics. People tend to count hiragana and katakana as different
scripts, but it makes more sense to consider them as a single script in
different styles comparable to upright, italic, bold. In fact, during the
history or in special situations (like computers in the old days or
telegrams), the roles of hiragana and katakana are often switched. You should
count them together as one script. Some bases for claiming that the two kanas
are a single script are:

(1) They show an almost one-to-one correspondence (exceptions being the use of
the long-vowel symbol and some minor subscript combinations in katakana, which
hiragana does not have).

(2) They have several characters which are very similar (such as う and ウ, や
and ヤ, か and カ, き and キ, へ and ヘ, り and リ), which goes well with the
understanding that they are mere different styles.

(3) Even more of the kanas than mentioned in (2) share the same Chinese
character as the origin (such as く and ク, etc.).

As for hiragana/katakana vs. kanji, a characteristics of Japanese is that it
does not segment the words (for example, by a space). The different graphical
impression of kanji vs. kana plays a role in identifying the word boundary. If
often coincides with transitions from kanji to kana or the other way around.
Chinese can go with Chinese characters only because a Chinese character
corresponds to a single word or a single morpheme, so the layout of a Chinese
character as a single block already counts for the purpose of identifying the
word/morpheme boundary.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-13T23:13:10.013
3989
2016-06-18T02:35:40.140
2016-06-18T02:35:40.140
11104
3984
answer
Many answers are answering "Why does there _need to_ be 3 ways" or "How are
they used", but not really _why are there_. I'll make an attempt...

The one line answer is: Because the need for a phonetic script was so big that
kanji which were previously only used for their phonetic value evolved into
separate scripts.

In the beginning, there were only Chinese scripts, and people would study
them.

Later, people would start using the kanji in these scripts only for their
semantic value, and actually pronounce the scripts in Japanese. But since
Japanese and Chinese are very different, including word order, this would mean
a lot of jumping around in the Chinese text, adding suffixes as particles that
were not explicitly marked in Chinese, etc. This excercise is still done by
Japanese students when studying Kanbun.

Later again, in order to make scripts easier to read and write in _actual_
Japanese, people would start using some kanji only for their phonetic value,
intermingle them with kanji to express verb endings, particles etc. Modern
Chinese also uses characters only for their phonetic value in some cases, but
obviously, this need is much bigger in Japanese.

Eventually, these phonetic kanji evolved into kana (which are basically
simplified phonetic kanji). Katakana and hiragana were created in different
ways, but are similar in this sense. They've been used for different purposes
through time, but the need to have both of them has survived until current
day.

I'm no expert on the history of Japanese scripts, but this should cover the
general idea. Feel free to correct me on inaccuracies.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2012-08-06T07:17:38.987
6423
2012-08-06T07:17:38.987
1073
3984
answer
Kanji were brought to Japan about 4th centry from China. Hiragana are phonetic
characters created from Chinese readings of kanji in around the eighth century
in Japan. For example, あ was created from 安 and い was created from 以.

Katakana were mainly created by Japanese scholars from Chinese readings of
kanji at the same time that hiragana were created. For example, ア was creatad
from 阿 and イ was created from 伊.

The reason why Japanese created hiragana and katakana are that writing kanji
is a bother and we want to use phonetic characters.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2014-10-13T10:18:30.410
19074
2014-10-13T11:10:37.787
2014-10-13T11:10:37.787
7320
7320
3984
answer
Your question

> Why are there kanji, hiragana and katakana? Is there a logical reason behind
> this or just tradition?

With regards `a logical reason behind this`, None of the answers here really
satisfied me, but I found [this
article](https://en.rocketnews24.com/2016/05/10/why-does-japanese-writing-
need-three-different-sets-of-characters-part-1/) which has some useful
suggestions, basically:

  1. Kanji may be considered a more "mature" or "sophisticated" way of expressing words. The author suggests that using hiragana in place of kanji comes across as childish. While I agree that kanji looks more impressive, I really don't think this alone is a good reason to continue its use.

  2. Japanese has several homonyms, which may cause ambiguity when written down (for example on a sign) rather than in speech, where there is often more context available. Since these homonyms would all look the same in hiragana, it is useful to have kanji representations to avoid confusion.

  3. Japanese text does not make use of spaces as we do in English, so if everything was written in hiragana it may become difficult to identify where a word starts or ends. So if we just use hiragana to represent particles/modifiers and kanji for our main words or concepts, it is much clearer what a sentence is trying to get across.

Now the article does not really explain _why_ katakana might have a logical
function, but as in point 3 above, we may consider that a sentence could be
built using kanji for our main concepts, hiragana for particles/modifiers and
katakana to represent words/concepts from foreign languages so that these can
be easily differentiated from the hiragana in the sentence. This way our
written Japanese can be much clearer.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2017-10-10T10:28:40.767
53723
2023-05-10T16:31:43.790
2023-05-10T16:31:43.790
26091
26091
3984
answer