Бесплатный фрагмент - Japanese Alphabet Copybook

Hiragana history.

The oldest written hiragana text dates back to 886 and was found on pottery shards kept in Fujiwara-no-Yoshimi’s house. The hiragana alphabet originated from an older script, man’yogana. Man’yogana is early Japanese writing, writing Japanese words in Chinese characters that sound similar. Chinese characters, written in the cursive style caoshu (jp. so: sho), formed the basis of the hiragana alphabet. The caoshu writing style was used mainly by women, so hiragana has long been considered a “female” writing (jp. onnade). Men wrote hieroglyphs in the statutory style of kaishu (jp. kaisho). Initially, each mora could be written in different hiragana characters, derived from different hieroglyphs. In 1900, a single sign was assigned to each sound. Obsolete spellings of hiragana characters are called hentaigana, “unusual kana”. Hentaigan signs can now be found on the signs of shops and restaurants, in documents issued by schools of martial and fine arts, in classical texts.