How were hiragana/katakana influenced by syllabary writing systems?


Today, I was in English class, and I learned about language families and then
writing systems. Of course, there is kanji, and ideographic system, but
hiragana and katakana are both syllabary systems.

How did this idea to make a syllabary writing system come about in
Japanese/Chinese history? Why did someone want to do it? Was the idea taken
over from people who had already done it?

Also, where to the syllabary sounds come from? For example, why is "yo" a
syllable in the system but "ye" or "yi" isn't?




In about 2000 years ago, people in Japan were still using clay vessels and had
no characters at all, while China had developed a large civilization and their
own writing system, kanji. In those days, Japanese and Chinese used completely
different languages, with completely different vocabulary, syllables, and
grammar.

In around the 1st to 4th century, kanji were gradually imported to Japan. At
first, kanji were only used as a part of Chinese language, by selected
Japanese people who want to study Chinese culture and religion (Buddhism).
There was still no way to write Japanese, spoken by Japanese people. Again,
Japanese is different from Chinese.

In around the 6th to 7th century, Japanese people developed "manyo-gana"
(万葉仮名). In this system, people used kanji as syllabary characters, totally
ignoring their meanings. For example, they used kanji 以 to represent the
Japanese vowel "i" (い). At last, Japanese people learned how to write Japanese
as it is pronounced. But unfortunately, manyo-gana were too complicated to
serve as syllabary characters, so they needed something better.

In around the 7th to 8th century, Japanese Buddhist monks started to simplify
manyo-gana, and developed purely phonetic characters, katakana. At first,
katakana were symbols rather than characters, used to instruct how to read
difficult scriptures from China. But they turned out to be useful to write
ordinary Japanese, so katakana were adopted everywhere. This was when people
started to mix kanji and katakana.

Almost at the same time, noble people developed hiragana, which is another
simplification of manyo-gana.

In summary, Japanese needed to develop syllabary characters (hiragana and
katakana) because kanji were only borrowed from Chinese, and only using kanji
was not enough to express Japanese language well. Chinese people did not need
such things because kanji were their native characters, optimized for writing
their own language.

I think Japanese people could have stopped using kanji altogether somewhere in
the history, but that never happened. Kanji have thier own strength as
ideographic characters. On the other hand, Korea used Chinese kanji until
several hundred years ago, and then stopped using them, in favor of their own
syllabary characters called _Hangul_.

I'm sorry I don't know where Japanese "sounds" come from.

