The Evolution of Hiragana

•

The Seen and Unseen Evolution of Hiragana

from cursive script of Chinese calligraphy back in the history...

Learning Japanese usually starts with learning hiragana, ひらがな（平仮名）, a phonetic lettering system which works as the syllables of Japanese.

During the course of learning Japanese, I want to explore the history of the hiragana which I am reading and writing almost every day. And my key question is:

How did it become what it is right now?

Please feel free to observe the transition and "fill in the blanks."

I made a 4-character group for each hiragana:

The leftmost is the regular script of the Chinese characters (汉字).

---> Going to the right, the regular script becomes half-cursive (the second one in the row).

---> The third one is the cursive script.

---> And finally, the rightmost, is the Japanese character, Hiragana (平仮名).

The background intends to mimic the type of paper ritually used to practice calligraphy in China (宣纸) and Japan (半紙).

Zoom in at the corner and the edge to see a brief history of hiragana in Japanese, Chinese, and English:

By juxtaposing the Chinese and the Japanese versions, I would like to demonstrate their similarities and differences: for example, the traditional direction of reading and writing is from top to bottom for both languages.

I also included English, apparently another language system, as it's not only the most widely used language but also the language through which I learn Japanese from textbook.

Here's a 5 x 10 chart of all hiragana characters from wikipedia just for you to refer to.

*a small note: yi, ye, and wu are obsolete; wi (ゐ), pronounced [i], and we (ゑ), pronounced [e], are extremely rare in modern Japanese. Thus, we didn't study about these 4 characters in class, and they were not included.

And here's the draft.