At 11:42 PM 1/1/97 -0800, Ryo-oh-ki wrote:
>Gregory Matteson said:
>:
>:        Someone asked me if Genji was written in Kanji or Kana.  It, and all
>:the other great literature of the period was written in vernacular Japanese,
>:in Hiragana, by women; western scholarly opinion being that the men were too
>:busy trying to write in the T'ang period Chinese in which Japan was
>:introduced to literacy, and which, by the beginning of the Heian period,
>:was a dead language.
>
>    The Heian period started in 894 AD, when Japan broke off
>    relations with the Tang Dynasty.  Everything they gathered
>    from China had to have taken place earlier.  You'd think
>    that the women would have been exposed to kanji 100 years
>    after the self-imposed isolation.
>
>:        Hiragana and Katakana were developed in the early Heian period,
>:probably by a Buddhist monk.
>
        The Buddhist connection is no coincidence. Buddhism regards women as
capable of salvation, therefore to be taken seriously and proselytised.  It
is also much easier to teach people to read an alphabet than ideographs,
especially if your main goal is to enable them to chant the sutras with
understanding.
        The above, combined with the intense sequestering of court women
created a seperate culture of literacy among women and the poorer classes of
Buddhist prosetylites.
        The western scholars' opinion that I included somewhat facetiously
and uncharitably, tends to ignore the linguistic realities of the seperate
literary cultures.  The sinified scholasticism of the upper class men won
out in the end, and they doubtless would have disagreed with the modern
tastes and prejudices which always prefer vernacular literature over refined
artificial literary manners.

>    To be even more complicated, hiragana and katakana were a
>    simplification of an even older and more complex phonetic
>    written alphabeta called "man'yougana", which in turn was
>    based on kanji.
>
        The modern synthesis of Kanji and Kana that is the present day
Japanese writing system developed at a later date, I'm not sure how early,
and I don't have the material at hand to research that. Do you know?

                Greg M.<matteson@ccnet.com>