Japanese-French and French-Japanese translation

Introduction of kana - hiragana

In the 7th and 8th centuries, the Japanese invented another script based on Chinese characters and known as 'kana' (loan-words). There are two types of kana: hiragana and katakana. The major innovation in Japanese writing took place during the Heian era, in which the totally syllabic script known as 'hiragana' was popularised by a Buddhist named Kobo Daishi. Partially based on Chinese script, hiragana is made up of simple and curved strokes, with each character representing one syllable. Not only is it easier and faster to write in hiragana, the method requires no knowledge of Chinese characters.

For example: →

A system originally borrowed from the Chinese

Writing arrived in Japan in the 6th and 7th centuries AD. As with so many elements of traditional Japanese culture, it was directly imported from China. In fact, as the Japanese had no script of their own, they were initially obliged by the expansion of literacy to use the characters inherited from the Middle Kingdom.

Chinese script is a mixture of ideograms and syllables. The most primitive Chinese characters were representations of objects. This pictographic script evolved in a similar way to Mesopotamian script, finally becoming a simplified, then a cursive system of writing, in which characters began to replace representations of objects.

For example,

the development of the character for 'tree': → traduction-japonais-arbre2-chinois

The Japanese first imported Chinese characters on a phonetic basis, before beginning to use them as ideograms— a script known as kanji.

Kanji is a very limited system and its use is highly problematic, as there are no equivalents for certain Japanese words. When the Japanese began to use words and concepts unique to their culture, there were therefore no suitable Chinese characters.

Introduction of kana - katakana

During the Heian period, hiragana was called onna-de (women's writing) because it was used in the composition of great Japanese literary works by major female authors such as Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon. As a result of these publications and portrayals of court life by groups of women, hiragana became the country's dominant writing system.

Shortly afterwards, the Buddhists developed a new writing system—'katakana' Like hiragana, katakana is a syllabic script, based on Chinese characters. Whereas hiragana was developed by writing Chinese characters with rapid, curved and fluid brush strokes, katakana also used Chinese characters, but only a part of each one—a sort of abbreviation.

For example: →

Japanese, four systems in one.

A perfect example of an agglutinative language, Japanese is thus made up of Kanji Chinese characters (10,000) and of double-syllabic kana characters (46 hiragana and 46 katakana). To read Japanese, you must therefore be able to find your way through three distinct systems. Following the introduction of the European alphabet, a fourth way of writing Japanese was developed.

Today's complex situation is a result of the introduction of ingenious technological solutions during the rise of literacy, resulting in many problems, such as the question of how to adapt a non-phonetic script to a totally different language or develop techniques designed to accelerate the writing of kanji.

As with so many scripts, these problems were solved by the development of a phonetic or syllabic system: a multi-cultural model which would renew itself automatically over the centuries.

For more information on:

Japanese translation,

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Japanese-French translation,

please see the Asian Languages translation page.

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The history of japanese script