Nicholas Bodley wrote:

>
> On Fri, 12 Dec 2003 13:45:14 +0000, Michael Everson <everson@...>
> wrote:
>
> > I don't think so. Hiragana is used in grammatical endings, Katakana
> > is used for foreign words.
> Katakana is, or was, also used for telegrams. Afaik, katakana is used in
> legal documents, presumably because kanki is sometimes open to
> interpretation.
> Katakana also works well with low-resolution dot-matrix character cells.*
> I'm fairly sure it can be rendered in a 7x9 cell, and perhaps even in a 5
> x 7 cell. The commonly-used kanji (Tôyô (sp?) Kanji?) require a cell at
> least 24 dots high, which is probably the reason tha 24-pin dot-matrix
> printers were developed as soon as they were.
>
> *A term applied to older computer monitors (such as 25 x 80 VGA text
> mode), before text was displayed essentially in graphics mode as a bitmap
> image, as it is now.)
>
> Historically, katakana was used by men, and hiragana by women, so I
> understand. I'm not sure I could find a suporting reference, but if
> there's a demand, I could search.

Not really. Christopher Seeley, *A History of Writing in Japan* (Brill,
1991; pbk. repr. Hawaii, 2000).

> Hiragana, being much more "cursive" can't be rendered properly in
> low-resolution character cells.
>
> > They are not interchangeable in the same way that Latin case forms are.
>
> Definitely true.
>
> > Latin capital letters are special shapes of small letters and/or vice
> > versa.
> > I don't think the same relationship applies to the Japanese syllabaries.
>
> Correct; it does not.
>
> I have studied Japanese writing as a rather-lazy dilettante now and then
> for quite a few years, and feel decently sure of what I state.
>
> Both kanas were developed by simplifying kanji that were used by Japanese
> strictly for phonetic purposes. If you see the parent kanji and the kana
> character that was derived from it, you can usually, if not always, see
> the derivation. (It might well help to be able to write kanji, too.)

The tables in *Schrift und Schriftlichkeit* are better than the tables
in Seeley.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...