Writing in Japanland

*This post is for an assignment

The Japanese written language was, unsurprisingly, ripped straight out of China. This posed a bit of a problem because of the stark differences between the two languages, and soon after its adoption Chinese writing was adapted to mesh with the intricacies of Japanese. Reconfigurations ranged from subtle to extreme. Japanese was initially modeled phonetically, using representations of sounds and syllables from the Chinese language and stringing them together to match a Japanese word. Eventually Japanese began to use the characters ideogrammatically, which followed the meaning of the Chinese word rather than its sound. These two techniques fused together came to be known as kanji. Japanese encountered problems when there were no words in the Chinese language that represented certain distinctly Japanese concepts, and the rules for spelling were a complete mess. Kana was soon introduced, which literally meant "borrowed words". Kana split off into two types, hiragana and katakana, of which hiragana became the dominant writing system in Japan. Reading Japanese requires the mastery of several different writing systems, including kanji, kana, and most recently, a knowledge of the European alphabet. While Japanese has its own unique history, its development was similar to those of many languages throughout the world.