History Of Japanese Writing

A Brief History of Japanese Writing

In due course a writing system called kanbun evolved, which used Chinese characters (kanji) which was similar to Chinese grammar, but often with marks placed alongside the Chinese text. An early written history of Japan was the Kojiki which was believed to have been written before 712 and was written in kanbun. Japanese schoolchildren are still taught introductory classes in kanbun today.

Then came the development of Japanese writing called manyogana in about 759, which used Chinese characters for their phonetic values. Manyogana was initially used for poetry, as in the Manyoshu. Both Hiragana and katakana were both developed from manyogana.

China had plainly influenced the Japanese writing language and spoken language at this early stage of development.

This Chinese-derived reading is known as on-yomi, and this vocabulary as a whole is referred to as Sino-Japanese. At the same time, native Japanese already had words corresponding to many borrowed kanji. Authors increasingly used kanji to represent these words. This Japanese-derived reading is known as kun-yomi. A kanji may have zero, one or several of each of on-yomi and kun-yomi. In verbs and adjectives, okurigana can help disambiguate a particular kanji's reading.

Western Influence

Western influences during the Meiji Era period and during the American occupation of Japan after World War II, also had important effects on the Japanese written language.

Until the Meiji period, Japanese text was written top to bottom, right to left. The Meiji era saw the first use of horizontally written Japanese.

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