no Japanese. In some, a single character has several Japanese readings, while on the other hand, the same Japanese word may be written with several different characters, just as in English each letter has various sounds, and each sound may be represented by various letters.
In addition to the Chinese ideographs, there came into use in Japan during the eighth and ninth centuries another system of writing, called the Kana, derived from those Chinese characters which happened to be most commonly employed. There are two varieties of Kana,—the Katakana or "side Kana" so called because the symbols composing it are "sides," that is, parts or fragments, of Chinese characters, as イ i, from the character 伊, ロ ro, from the character 呂, etc.; and the Hiragana, which consists of cursive forms of entire Chinese characters, as は ha, in which the outline of the original 波 may still be faintly traced. The invention of the former is popularly attributed to a worthy named Kibi-no-Mabi (died A.D. 776), and that of the latter to the Buddhist saint, Kōbō Daishi (A.D. 834). But it is more reasonable to suppose that the simplification for such it really is, and not an invention at all came about gradually, than to accept it as the work of two individuals.
Whereas a Chinese character directly represents a whole word—an idea—the Kana represents the sounds of which the word is composed, just as our Roman writing does. There is, however, this difference, that the Kana stands for syllables, not letters. The following tables of the Katakana and Hiragana will help to make this clear. We give the former in the order preferred by modern scholars, and termed Go-jū-on, or "Table of Fifty Sounds" (though there are in reality but forty-seven), the latter in the popular order, called I-ro-ha, which has been handed down from the ninth century:—
