Shuichi Koga wrote:

> the Buddhist monks and men in the Emperial Court; women primarily used
> the hiragana system (the Tale of Genji is written mostly in
> hiragana). I vaguely remember reading somewhere that women actually
> designed the hiragana system, but I don't remember a source for it.

If you look at the hirigana system of writing, several characters are the same as

the style of Chinese "grass book" writings.. or simplified and styled writing with

a brush.

My personal theory is that some of the hirigana characters were constructed from
these stylized characters..

  Here's a few examples:

  The hirigana for the sound "A" looks exactly like a simplified writing of the
word "awn" or "Peace" in Chinese.
S-JIS: ｎ
Big5:  ヲw

  The hirigana for "ya" in Japanese looks similar to the stylized word "ya" in
Chinese (not sure of its exact meaning.. probably there isn't an exact meaning.)
S-JIS: や
Big5: 、]

  The hirigana for "me" looks the same as the stylized word for "leu" .. or
"girl"...
S-JIS: め
Big5:  、k

The most convincing case is the hirigana for "hu"/'fu".. which looks just like
the stylized character for "but" ("bu" in Mandarin)...
S-JIS: ふ
Big: 、」

Some of the other hirigana also look like stylized Chinese characters.. however, I

not all the characters can be compared to the stylized Chinese characters... I
would think that there was another factor influencing their creation.

> een more than a few times when a large influx of Chinese culture was
> imported). Is that traditional or simplified Chinese? I have no idea
> when Chinese started being delineated as such.

That would be traditional Chinese, I believe.  There have been simplifications
over the course of Chinese history, but I think the latest designation of
"simplified" is more recent.. probably the work of Chairman Mao.. or maybe of the

Guoming Dong party..


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Kevin Aw <kevinaw@home.com>