Hiragana

Hiragana is one of Japan's two syllabaries, and the softer, rounder one. It was distilled from Chinese characters: scribes had long been using whole kanji purely for their sound to write Japanese — a practice called man'yōgana — and hiragana is what you get when those characters are written fast and cursive until only a flowing skeleton remains. あ is the cursive ghost of 安, か of 加, さ of 左.

Because it could write any Japanese sound without the burden of learning thousands of kanji, it was embraced early on for personal letters and literature — famously by the women of the Heian court. The masterpiece The Tale of Genji is written largely in it.

"A whole Chinese character, written fast for a thousand years, until only a breath of it is left."

Today hiragana carries the grammar of Japanese: verb endings, particles, and words with no common kanji. Its parent is kanji itself (the Han script), and its sibling is katakana, the angular syllabary drawn from fragments of the same characters. See the descent in the Han Wing.

Before hiragana, Japanese was written with man'yōgana — whole Chinese characters borrowed for their sound alone, ignoring their meaning. Written quickly and repeatedly, the elaborate strokes of each character collapsed into a single fluid gesture. What survives in each hiragana sign is the cursive reduction of one particular kanji.