ABSTRACT
We have traced the process of adapting the Chinese script to Japanese requirements up to a point where the phonetic use of Chinese symbols to represent Japanese particles and terminations was well established by its use in various chronicles and anthologies compiled from the fifth to the ninth century. The process was a gradual one. The verses in the M anyoshu are not exclusively written in kana. The early poems, say those up to the end of the seventh century, are written with characters used according to meanings, and their reconstruction is not easy; but those of the middle of the eighth century are written phonetically. We have already observed that the use of a complete Chinese character to represent each syllable of words in a polysyllabic language was an awkward and tiresome method. It must be remembered, however, that these characters were as a rule written not in the way in which they appear in printed books but in an abbreviated cursive style, known as the 'grass hand'. Thus the character 9;0 chi, 'knowledge', used as a phonetic symbol for the sound chi, was written in a running hand !" and this was gradually abbreviated through various stages, such as 1:" until it took the simple form f,. It is natural to suppose that the convenience of these abbreviations suggested to the Japanese the selection of a number of simplified characters to be reserved for phonetic uses. The Japanese tradition affirms that Kobo Daishi, a famous priest who lived from A. D. 774-835, himself chose forty-seven of these signs and fixed them as the conventional equivalents of forty-seven syllables into which the sounds of the Japanese language had been analysed. These were called hiragana. which may be taken to mean' easy kana', and constitute an alphabet, or rather a syllabary, by which Japanese words can be written according to their sound. It is quite likely that Kobo Daishi was responsible for this selection, but it is incorrect to say that he was the inventor of a Japanese alphabet. The idea of using characters as phonetics was, as we have seen, not a new one, and it had been applied by the Chinese centuries before. Kobo Daishi, if it was he, can hardly have done more than simplify the forms and
reduce the number of kana. Before this the selection of Chinese characters to represent Japanese sounds was more or less a matter of individual taste. Many different characters were used for each sound, sometimes the same character was used for more than one sound. Even when the use of simplified characters became common, there was nothing in the nature of a fixed alphabet, and the total number of hiragana symbols used to represent forty-seven sounds was nearly three hundred. Many of these have been eliminated, and the hiragana in common use to-day may be said to be standardized, and to show as a rule little more variation than is seen in the different styles of writing or printing our alphabet.
