Re: Orthography Question

At 00:16 10/11/98 -0500, you wrote:
>Eric Christopherson wrote:
>> Hey! I always wondered why _tabako_ was written in hiragana! :D
>
>Yeah, apparently it's just been in the language for so long, that they
>seem to have forgotten that it was foreign!  Or maybe when it entered
>the language the distinction between hiragana and katakana wasn't so
>strict?  Any Japanese experts out there?
>
>--
>"It has occured to me more than once that holy boredom is good and
>sufficient reason for the invention of free will." - "Lord Leto II"
>(Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert)
>http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files/
>ICQ #: 18656696
>AOL screen-name: NikTailor
>
>
        As far as I know of the origin of katakana and hiragana, there has
always been an important distinction between katakana and hiragana. It's
just the kind of distinction that changed.

        In the 10th century, the Japanese (only men) used Chinese ideograms
to write Japanese words. They used them only with their phonetic value
(actually approximately as Japanese phonetics are very different from
Chinese phonetics). Then a "female" literature began to appear. Women didn't
have the right to write and read, but they passed through it inventing from
some Chinese ideograms the first syllabary which was hiragana. At that time,
it was called "women's writing" (I don't remember the expression in
Japanese). Only a century later, men created another syllabary (I think they
were bored of writing ideograms) from a different set of ideograms. It was
thought, I think, as a kind of stenography, so it was simpler than hiragana.
Now that syllabary is called katakana. At that time (if I remember well, it
was the 12th century), Japanese was written with two syllabaries: women
wrote in hiragana and men in katakana. Then I don't know really what
happened but the ideograms were reintroduced with, this time, their meaning
(not only their pronunciation), the hiragana came to be used for the
gramatical endings and some native Japanese words, and the katakana lost
position and finally were only used for loanwords (very much used nowadays),
'onomatopees' (don't know the word in English) (with a much broader use than
in European languages, one can speak in Japanese only with those
'onomatopees') and words that are meant to be seen (as our italics). In
fact, those three uses are almost the same: showing it's different from the
normal speech (even if 'onomatopees' are considered as very normal, though
very familiar -and a little childish sometimes-).

        Maybe we can find 'tabako' written in hiragana or in katakana
because it was borrowed before the usage of the syllabaries was fixed.

                                                Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"R=E9sister ou servir"

homepage: http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html