Why does katakana exist

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English US. Since thre already a lot of words that when spelled in hiragana, have the same pronunciation it would make reading hiragana a lot more difficult. As well as there needing to be much more kanji to read. So, men would have be taught Kanji as part of their education in Chinese classics, Confucianism, Buddhism and history; whereas Women would have not have been taught such things.

I've no idea when, but at some point someone decided to invent a written script so that they could communicate - which is where the theory that it was a woman comes in. This implies that the person or people who invented the Kana where of high standing otherwise they'd have to toil all day , and that they needed to communicate, in writing, with someone who was educated - probably a Husband or Father, due to the history of "Kidnapping" one's opponent's family members again, this is speculation on my part.

I realise this answer is a little ramble-o-matic in nature, that I may have skated around the topic, and that I haven't quoted any sources I'm at work at the minute, but I'll edit later on as and when I find evidence ; so I apologise if this isn't of a high enough standard to answer the original question. I think it is largely a myth that women invented hiragana. We see many documents written by men at the time that mix kanji , katakana , and hiragana , so hiragana was not only used by women, but women only knew how to use hiragana.

While we know this isn't true, and that the creation of hiragana was a gradual process, he greatly sped up the process of making kana by introducing the first purely phonetic script, Siddham still used in some Buddhist temples in Japan today.

Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Why was both katakana and hiragana created? Ask Question. Asked 9 years, 10 months ago. Active 3 years, 4 months ago. Viewed 40k times. Improve this question. Community Bot 1. Andrew Grimm Andrew Grimm Hmm, originally Katakana was used by men, while Hiragana by women, no..?

Because only men used to read Classical Chinese. Chocolate: Although, for a while during the 19th century and the era 20th century, okurigana were printed in katakana. Look at any WWII-era text ZhenLin san Ah yes I know, I've seen that before. Hmm, I have no idea. The only real life use of latin letters for Japanese are intended to foreigners: some direction panels at main airports and such, and to write people name on passports. On smart phones however, direct kana input is prevalent.

Latin characters can be used for loan words when they're directly taken, in more formal speak. For example business settings. Katakana is a mirror to hiragana making it easy to learn and understand.

It is used both for loan words as well as for words with overly complex kanji like animal names and for emphasis like writing something in CAPS. The roman alphabet is actually more complex than the kana system and covers way more sounds and variables than the Japanese language uses. Note not all foreign language words are natively written in the roman alphabet as well.

Katakana are also used to transcribe words of Russian, Korean, Arabic, Vietnamese, etc origin. When we write a foreign word in English in a sentence we don't write it in the original languages writing system, we write it in our own in order to properly understand it and often italicize, bold or caps it so it stands out.

It seems a bit rude to insist the Japanese learn a foreign alphabet for foreign words that doesn't even cover all foreign languages , when they can write it in one that makes more sense to them both in terms of syllable structure and style.

It helps if you understand the history of the Japanese writing system. Japanese started as a spoken language only.

No writing system at all. Writing was first brought to Japan in the form of religious scrolls written in Chinese using Chinese characters. To help Japanese natives better understand the writing, annotations were made to these texts in the form of simplified characters. These simplified characters were chosen for their phonetic component, rather than meaning. Different short-hand forms developed over time. Some were lost, but a few survived to eventually become hiragana and katakana.

These two different character sets look different because they were developed independently to serve the same purpose - a shorthand script that was easier to write than full Chinese and purely phonetic. Sometimes the same kanji was used for developing the character associated with a particular sound in both character sets, so they look similar.