What is the purpose of hiragana in Japanese?

Kana

Despite the appellation syllabary, the basic unit that kana represent is actually the mora. These are the so-called short vowels (V), with or without a preceding consonant (CV) or a consonant-glide combination (CyV); the mora nasal /n/ (a one-beat resonant with several conditioned allophones); and the mora obstruent /q/, which precedes obstruents and causes a one-beat delay in their release. Japanese syllables consist of one or two (occasionally more) morae; the distinction between syllable and mora is essential for the description of pitch accent, present in most dialects but not indicated in standard orthography (for further details, see Vance, 1987).

Number and Form

The two sets of kana contain 48 basic shapes, of which 47 are traditionally arrayed, as shown in Table 1. This arrangement, called the gojūon-zu or 50 sound chart (despite its gaps), is first attested around 901. It is meant to be read from the upper right corner in Chinese style so that the order of morae is a i u e o, ka ki ku ke ko, sa si su se so, etc. This ordering was inspired by the siddhaṃ script for Sanskrit, and is currently the standard collating sequence for word sorting analogous to alphabetization. (Another collating sequence still occasionally encountered begins i ro ha ni ho he to, etc.) [See the multimedia annex.

Table 1. Modern Kana and their Kanji sources

In reading Table 1, note the following:

Katakana are shown to the right of the corresponding hiragana in the unshaded cells. The kanji from which the kana is/are believed to have arisen are shown underneath in shaded cells. Column headings give the initial consonant of the mora represented by the kana below (zero in the case of the first column); the row headings give the final vowel. N.B. /si/ = [ʃi], /ti/ = [tʃi], /tu/ = [tsi̶], /hi/ = [çi], /hu/ = [ɸɯ].

Morae of the form CyV are written by combining the appropriate Ci kana with a small version of the appropriate yV kana. For example, /kya/

; /syu/ = [ʃɯ]

; /tyo/ = [tʃ

]

. There once was a mora /kwa/, written

and

. This kind of digraphic notation has been extended to innovative morae such as /kwo/

, /ye/

, etc., which occur in new loanwords and so are seldom seen in hiragana.

A diacritic called nigori or dakuten indicates the voicing of an obstruent initial; e.g., /gi/

; /zu/

; /de/

; and /bo/

. Modern /h/ originated as /p/; hence the kana in the h-column are used for morae in b-. Modern /p/ is marked with another diacritic, called maru or handakuten; e.g., /pa/

.

The morae /wi we wo/ have merged with /i e o/. Only the kana for /wo/ is in current use (the katakana is seldom seen); see Historical Spellings below.

The mora nasal /n/ (usually romanized as syllable-final n) is written with hiragana

and katakana

(not part of the gojūon-zu). The mora obstruent /q/ (usually romanized as a geminate) is notated with hiragana

, katakana

small versions of the kana for /tu/.

Function

Since 1945, katakana have been used, like italics in English, for the transcription of unfamiliar loanwords and for emphasis; they were also used for writing telegram forms and are still seen in certain kinds of computer output. Hiragana are the default kana for ordinary writing; they are used for postpositions, many adverbs, sometimes for nouns, and the variable endings of verbs and adjectives (in which case they are called okurigana send-off kana). They are also the currently preferred kana set for notating the intended readings of kanji (furigana); e.g., the personal name

can be Tsuchii or Doi, so it is sometimes necessary to write

or

to make the reading clear. (Historically, katakana were adapted from kanji specifically to serve as furigana, but are thus used less often today.)

The modern notations for so-called long vowels and innovative morae in hiragana and katakana differ. For example, the syllable /too/ is written

〈to u〉 in hiragana (

〈to o〉 in a few words) but usually

〈to ː〉 in katakana, where the long mark

(bō) has no hiragana counterpart. Likewise, hiragana

〈ne i〉 or, in a few words,

〈ne e〉 are both used for /nee/, whereas modern katakana usage prescribes

〈neː〉. An example of an innovative mora is [ti]. In native and Sino-Japanese morphemes, /ti/ is realized [tʃi] and is represented by hiragana

or katakana

; to accomodate the [ti] some speakers produce in recent loanwords like [paːtiː] party (cf. more conservative [paːtʃiː]), a new digraph notation is therefore used, viz. katakana

. (The parallel hiragana

is possible but rare since innovative morae occur in loanwords.)

Japanese

The Japanese language system consists of two different types of script: Kanji, a logographic form borrowed from Chinese characters, and varieties of the syllabic form of Kana, mainly, Hiragana and Katakana. A Japanese sentence is written by combining all three of these scripts to form different classes of words (Wydell, 2003). Japanese Kana has a direct one-to-one relationship between its orthographic representation and its pronunciation. Because of this direct link between phonology and orthography, children learn the Kana script very quickly in school (Wydell, 2003). Japanese Kanji, however, is taught at junior or high school level. The most striking difference between Kanji and Kana is that Kana depends on the phonological system for its correct pronunciation, and Kanji is more dependent on the visual spatial system for correct processing. This is because each Kanji character is made up of a morphological element that has no phoneme component or correspondence; that is, a Kanji character does not map directly onto any particular phoneme (Wydell, 1998).

Case studies of brain-damaged patients describe the symptoms of phonological alexia in Kana and Kanji as the inability to read nonwords in both scripts (Patterson et al., 1996; Sasanuma et al., 1996), though it has been suggested that the two scripts use somewhat different neural networks. It is often extremely difficult to compare neuroimaging studies across languages because of differences in various aspects of protocol, including the choice of specific experimental and baseline task demands. Despite these difficulties, a number of studies now indicate that processing of both Kana and Kanji generally activate the same cortical areas as each other and as are activated in similar studies using English. At the same time, and despite the activation of overlapping cortical regions, it appears that processing Kanji involves heavier visual orthographic demands and uses a lexical-semantic system through a more ventral route, involving the inferior occipital, fusiform, and posterior inferior temporal gyri, whereas Kana is processed in a more phonetic manner through a more dorsal route, involving temporoparital areas (for elaboration and review, see Thuy et al., 2004).

Behavioral studies using the visual half-field technique have sometimes reported a RVF/left hemisphere advantage for identifying Kana words and nonwords, but a LVF/right hemisphere advantage for identifying Kanji words and nonwords (Hatta, 1977; Sasanama et al., 1977), leading some to conclude that the left and right hemispheres are superior for processing Kana and Kanji, respectively (e.g., Coltheart, 1980). It has been suggested that it is the visual complexity of Kanji stimuli that leads to more dependence on right-hemisphere processing, with right-hemisphere dominance for visuospatial processing outweighing any left-hemisphere superiority for other stages of processing involved in stimulus identification. In contrast to English, there may not be any laterality effects for lexical decision tasks for Kanji (Hatta, 1981), though there is a RVF/LH advantage for lexical decision tasks for Katakana and Hiragana (Yoshizaki, 2001). A RVF/LH advantage for Kanji emerges, however, if the task requires a more semantic judgment (Hatta, 1981).

In a visual half-field field study that required native speakers of Japanese to identify three-letter Kana nonwords presented vertically, Hellige and Yamauchi (1999) found a robust RVF/left hemisphere advantage. Although there were more third-letter errors than first-letter errors, consistent with sequential processing of the letters, this was equally true for both LVF and RVF trials. Hellige and Yamauchi suggest that this may stem from the way in which Kana maps on to pronunciation. Specifically, a word or nonword made up of Kana characters is pronounced exactly as it is spelled: letter by letter. That is, there is no emergent or unitary pronunciation, as there is in English (D-A-G is pronounced daeg), and consequently, less reason for the specialized language mechanisms of the left hemisphere to process the letter sequence in a more holistic way. In addition, Kana is most typically scanned from top to bottom, which is quite different from the languages discussed earlier, and this may contribute to the lack of visual field differences in qualitative error patterns.

Chinese Influence and Language Awareness

The Japanese writing system is indebted to Chinese, and no indigenous script has ever been developed. Kojiki (Record of ancient matters, 712) was transcribed in Chinese characters solely as phonetic signs, and Nihonshoki (Chronicles of Japan, 720) was written perfectly in classical Chinese style. It was not until the 10th century that the two syllabaries, katakana and hiragana, which were developed out of simplified Chinese characters, were widely used throughout the country.

It is not clear when kanji (Chinese characters) first reached Japan, but the scholar Wani from the Korean peninsula is said to have brought 11 volumes of Chinese writings, including the Analects of Confucius, as early as the 4th century. While the Japanese people of that time introduced overwhelmingly higher systematized philosophy and religious dogma such as Confucianism and Buddhism, they continued to respect their own traditional values. In terms of language consciousness, they continued worshipping the miraculous power of their mother tongue and used kanji for the male domain of learning and writing, for example, official documents, scholarly texts, and formal letters, and yamatokotoba (the pure native language written in hiragana) for expressing things spiritual, emotional, sentimental, etc. Describing love and human nature, Lady Murasaki's 11th-century Genji-monogatari (The tale of Genji) was written almost entirely in yamatokotoba.

III Nonalphabetic Writing Systems

Figure2 illustrates three Southeast Asian scripts. Whatever superficial similarity they might present to the untutored eye, they are quite different in their design principles. They indeed are ordered in Fig.2 in terms of their basic units, ranging from the alphabetic Korean at the top through the morphemic Chinese at the bottom, with the syllabic Japanese kana in the middle. Thus, Chinese associates a basic written unit with a morpheme (roughly speaking); Japanese kana associates a written unit with a syllable; and Korean associates a written unit with a phoneme. The Korean case is interesting; the unit at the top of Fig.2 comprises a syllable, and the system has been classified incorrectly as a syllabary in some analyses. However, the specific elements inside the syllable space correspond to phonemes, so Korean is an alphabetic system. (For research on Korean, see Simpson & Kang, 1994.)

Fig.2. Three Southeast Asian scripts that differ in their design principles: (A) Korean, (B) Japanese kana, and (C) Chinese.

Whereas Korean requires the learning of graphemephoneme pairs, as in English, learning Japanese kana requires correspondences to be learned between written units and spoken syllables. The system is very productive, allowing a reader, knowing only the set of kana, to read the vast repertory of multisyllabic words that constitute Japanese vocabulary. But there is a second system to be learned, the kanji, the borrowed Chinese writing system.5 This system, as with Chinese itself, requires a kind of memorization of associations between characters and meanings and pronunciations.

Local Languages

Palauan: A Western Malayo-Polynesian language of the Austronesian family, Palauan was spoken by 65% of the population in 2000. For a linguistic description of Palauan, see Josephs (1975, 1990, 1997, 1999); Flora (1974); Wilson (1972); Tkel (2000). It is currently the only national language of the country and is an official language alongside English. Before the Japanese era, Palauan was an oral language and had no written form. During the Japanese and U.S. administrations, Japanese kana (katakana and hiragana) and the Roman alphabet were adopted as phonograms for Palauan. Although the Palauan writing system currently has dual orthographies depending on the age of the user, change is under way from kana to the Roman alphabet. The official ballot papers for the 1992, 1997, and 2004 elections in Koror, Melekeok, and Angaur States, for example, used a dual writing system for the names of Palauan candidates (Roman alphabet and katakana), with Palauan and English bilingual instructions in the Roman alphabet. However, after the 2004 elections, the Palau Election Commission approved a new regulation eliminating the use of katakana on future election ballot papers.

Numerous loanwords were integrated into Palauan during the colonial era, especially from Japanese. Many Japanese loanwords have replaced existing native Palauan words (see Josephs, 1984; Matsumoto, 2001b). Because of the change of high language after World War II, there are significant differences in the use of Palauan among different age groups; older Palauans speak Palauan with many Japanese words, phrases, or expressions, while middle-aged and young Palauans speak Palauan with a greater number of English ones. However, regardless of age, in the domains of music and food culture, there is very heavy lexical borrowing from Japanese into Palauan (Matsumoto, 2001b; Matsumoto and Britain, 2003a).

Sonsorolese: A Ponapeic-Trukic, Micronesian language of the Austronesian family, Sonsorolese is spoken by the 40-odd residents of Sonsorol State (including Pulo Anna and Mirir), located about 200 km southwest of the capital, Koror. It is also spoken by an unknown number who were relocated in the early 20th century to the settlement of Eang, near Koror, following typhoon damage to Sonsorol Island.

Tobian: Also a Ponapeic-Trukic, Micronesian language of the Austronesian family, Tobian is spoken by the roughly 20 residents of Hatohebei State including Helen's Reef, located about 380 km south of Koror. It is also spoken by an unknown number who were relocated to Eang. In the 2000 census, 75% of the population of Eang claimed to speak a Carolinian Micronesian language the significance of this is that three times as many speakers of Sonsorolese Tobian live in Eang than live on the islands themselves.

The extent of mutual intelligibility between Tobian and Sonsorolese is unclear. Capell (1969) considers them to be dialects of the same language, but the two varieties form the southwestern end of a dialect continuum that extends northeastward to islands such as Ulithi that form the western edge of the archipelago of the Federated States of Micronesia. For a linguistic description of Sonsorolese-Tobian, see Capell (1969).

Integration

An invention that is an integration is one that combines ideas from two distinct domains of invention. An example of an historical integration is the complex evolution of the Japanese written language. Originally, Japanese was strictly a spoken language, but around AD500, Japanese speakers began to use Chinese kanji (pictographs) to represent Japanese words. While written Japanese looked identical to the Chinese, any one character was pronounced in two different ways, one of which approximated the Chinese pronunciation, and the other of which corresponded to the Japanese word bearing the same meaning. Since 1945, close to 2,000 kanji have been designated as Kanji for Daily

Use in the Japanese language. These are the kanji that children learn in school today (Miyagawa, 2000).

By AD1000, however, the Japanese needed a supplemental system to represent Japanese words that had no Chinese counterpart. To meet this purpose, syllabaries called kana were derived from Chinese characters. Rather than representing the meaning of a whole word, a kana represents a syllable or sound. There are two systems of kana in modern Japanese. The first, called hiragana, originated with Buddhist priests. While they were translating Chinese works into Japanese, they began inserting syllables next to characters to designate a particular Japanese inflection or alternate meaning from the Chinese (Vogler, 1998). The second system of kana, katakana, is primarily used to represent foreign words.

The original use of Chinese characters to represent Japanese words may be viewed as a redefinition of sorts. That is, the meaning remained the same while the label, or way of reaching that meaning, changed. However, the entire Japanese language is best seen as an integration (and subsequent forward incrementation) of symbol systems. Specifically, the introduction of kana to modify kanji is a particularly good example of melding two representational systems into one entirely new system. The meanings of words with kanji and kana are not fully decipherable based solely on the kanji, evidence that a true integration has taken place.

An example of integration in science is Isaac Newton's (16421727) formulation of the universal law of gravity. In essence, this discovery was a synthesis of ideas proposed by thinkers such as Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Hooke. Newton succeeded in explaining how a singular concept of gravity could explain a variety of observations made by scientists past and contemporary. While Copernicus had dared to oppose the Ptolemaic notion that planets encircle the sun and Kepler had demonstrated that the orbits were elliptical, no one had been able to explain why such elliptical orbits would emerge. Newton discerned the mathematical rule by which elliptical orbits would result, thus explaining the relationship between planets and the sun. In his 1687 The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Newton described basic principles that could mathematically account for the diverse predictions made by Copernicus and Kepler.

This contribution is a grand synthesis. Not only did Newton bring together a variety of ideas to explain planetary motion. He also recognized the relationship of this phenomenon to another and essentially integrated the two problems by offering a single solution to both. Newton showed that his principles governing the movement of bodies in the sky could also account for a second, formerly unrelated, problem: that of the motion of objects on the earth. Essentially, Newton's universal law of gravity declared that matter attracts matter. That is, the sun attracts the planets just as the Earth's gravity pulls on objects near its surface. By achieving this insight, Newton explained two major physical questions of his time with one universal law, an integrative contribution that has remained the basis of physics ever since.

The Dawn of Premodern Lexicography (900 a.d.1868 a.d.)

Development of Kanwa Jiten

The oldest of the three categories of dictionaries is the ChineseJapanese character dictionary. In the 7th century, Buddhism was introduced into Japan by way of Korea. Because there was no indigenous writing system in Japan at that time, the Buddhist monks had to learn how to read and write Chinese by consulting imported Chinese monolingual dictionaries, such as Erya (

), Shuowen Jiezi (

), and Yupian (

). Gradually they compiled a list of Chinese characters with Japanese translations, which grew into a genre of Kanwa Jiten (

; ChineseJapanese character dictionaries). The first Chinese character dictionary produced in Japan was the Shinsen Jikyou (

), compiled by a Buddhist monk, Shouju, probably between 898 and 901 a.d. Following the Shinsen Jikyou, numerous ChineseJapanese character dictionaries appeared. Among those produced from the Heian period (794 a.d.1185) through the Edo period (16001868), four stand out: Tenrei Banshou Meigi (

, 30 vols., early 9th century1) by a Buddhist monk, Kukai; Ruiju Myogi Shou (

, 10 vols, late 11th century, author unknown); and Jikyou (

) and Wagokuhen (

) (dates and compilers unknown). The primary aim of these dictionaries was to provide information on how to read Chinese characters and their translations by using the Japanese writing system (Manyogana, a set of Chinese characters developed in the 8th century to be used as phonetic symbols to represent Japanese syllables, and katakana and hiragana, a system of 48 syllabic writing units for writing non-Chinese loan words and indigenous Japanese words, respectively).

Development of Kokugo Jiten

Because ChineseJapanese character dictionaries were not able to describe Japanese indigenous words, there was a pressing need for Japanese monolingual dictionaries. One of the earliest extant examples of such a dictionary is the Iroha jirui shou (

), compiled by Tachibana no Tadakane between 1174 and 1181. It is a prototype of similar dictionaries in use today. Unlike Chinese character dictionaries, its entries are arranged according to sound (using iroha poetry) rather than Chinese characters. Nowadays most monolingual dictionaries are generally arranged on the basis of the standard gojyuon (50-sound) system. Notable examples of premodern monolingual dictionaries produced from the late Muromachi period (13331568) to the late Edo period include: Setsuyoushu (

; the first one was compiled in the mid-Muromachi period, with various subsequent versions appearing throughout the Edo period); Wakun no shiori (

, compiled by Tanikawa Kotosuga in the mid-Edo era; the first monolingual dictionary arranged in the gojyuon system); and Gagen shoran (

, compiled by Ishikawa Masamochi from 182649; revised by Nakajima Hirotari in 1887; the first monolingual dictionary illustrating the meanings of old Japanese words with examples from authentic texts) (Kimura, 2002).

Early Western Influence

In the Azuchi-Momoyama (15731597) and the Edo (16001868) periods, lexicographical methods used in Europe were introduced through the Europeans who had contact with the Japanese under special circumstances. Among them were the Jesuit missionaries who compiled bilingual dictionaries such as Rahonichi Jisho (Dictionaricum Latino-Lusitanicum ac Iaponicum, 1595) and Nippo Jisho (Vocabulario lingua de Iapam com adeclaraa em Portugues, 1603). During the Edo period, the Netherlands was the only country that was allowed to have trade relations with Japan. People learned Rangaku (i.e., Dutch studies) in order to absorb Western culture. Inamura Sanpaku and others translated François Halma's DutchFrench dictionary, Woordenboeck der Nederduitsche en Fransche Taalen (1708), and compiled a DutchJapanese bilingual version called Halma Wage (

, published in 1796; 80000 entries). This version was called Edo Halma, while the one translated later in 1816 by Hendrick Doeff, head of the Dutch trading post at Nagasaki, was called Nagasaki Halma. The latter version was never printed, and students at the Tekijuku academy of Dutch studies in Osaka made their own manuscript copies. It was later revised by Katsuragawa Hoshu and published under the title Oranda jii.

It was not until the introduction of Western lexicography in the Meiji era that Japanese lexicography began its modern phase of development. One of the most influential dictionaries was James Curtis Hepburn's JapaneseEnglish dictionary Waei Gorin Shusei (

; 1867; JapaneseEnglish: 20772 entries; EnglishJapanese and: 10030 entries). Due to its systematic description of Japanese words, this dictionary not only influenced other bilingual dictionaries (JapaneseGerman and JapaneseFrench, among others) but also had a great influence on the development of Japanese monolingual dictionaries. The third edition (JapaneseEnglish: 35618 entries; EnglishJapanese: 15697 entries), which appeared in 1886, was especially famous as it introduced Hepburn's Romanization, a transliteration scheme for writing Japanese, for the very first time. This Romanization system became the standard in Japan and is still used today.