On Sat, 1 May 1999, Kevin Aw wrote:
>   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.

One explanation given is that katakana was designed as a sort of phonetic
shorthand used by buddhist students during lectures.

>   My personal theory is that some of the hirigana characters were constructed from

> these stylized characters..

http://members.aol.com/joyo96/Hira/Hiragana.html gives an explanation of
the origination of Hiragana. It appears they were constructed from a
simplified version of sosho style kanjis.

My kanji dictionary has a table with the hiragana and katakana derivations
from kanjis.

-Dan