Why are there 3 ways of writing in Japanese?

Question

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

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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 syles 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 charasteriscics 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.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

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.