suzmccarth wrote:

> What about the influence of Sanskrit on the Japanese writing
> system? Maybe hiragana is a descendent of devanagiri, in the sense
> that the inventors of hiragana had seen devanagiri and got the idea
> of how to organize a syllabic system from that.

While the Japanese kana systemmy have had some influence from Sanskrit
or Indic syllable-based writing, kana is *not* a descendent of Sanskrit.
The sources for the various kana are well documented, given that they're
all from Chinese characters.
I would say that the fact the Japanese knew Chinese characters to be
monosyllabic and thusly not the best suited to a polysyllabic
morphologically rich language used multiple Chinese characters strung in
a row to represent Japanese strings of syllables... (very very very well
documented from teh earliest period, cf. Manyoshu, etc., influence from
Korean Idu writing, etc.).
The whole re-organization of the kana tables similar to that of the
Indic aksharas is a later development, given the famous indigenous
"poem" i-ro-ha....

> After all even the Chinese fanqie rhyming tables follow the
> introduction of Buddhist text into China. Sometimese it is useful to
> separate the form and structure of the individual written units from
> the way they function within a system.

ok .. hold up...

fanqie, as a system, is not tabular at all...
fanqie is a system where two characters of relatively common use are
used to indicated the composition of a syllable:

[fq1][fq2]qie = [character in question]
fq1 = initial
fq2 = rhyme+tone

These tables that have been posted about ... they're *not* the fanqie
system, but are tabular representations of rhyme tables...
The underlying system of these tables have received some influence from
Indic grammatology, but are *not* directly descended therefrom.

Rhyme tables have their history back in the Tang dynasty. They were
devised to "standardize" rhyming in poetry, providing speakers of
varying language varieties of the time a way to look up what
characters/words would rhyme with each other. They have inherently built
in much of the information that the fanqie system provided, but in a
much more systematized manner...
Instead of up to multiples of 10s for a single initial or rhyme type,
intials and rhymes were organized classified so that there were a
manageable set of referents.

The insistent claim that these systems *had* to derive from Indic
sources is still not completely clear.
*Prior* to the fanqie system, as well as the rhyme tables, Sinitic
scholars had already provided a system for categorizing Chinese
characters... so...

what gives?

cheers,
-patrick