Abstract
Japanese can be written in either phonetic (Kana) or logographic (Kanji) characters (see Fig. 1). Each of these scripts can express almost any word in the Japanese lexicon. Kanji are of Chinese origin, having been derived from archaic pictograms (as shown in Fig. 2) while Kana are a purely Japanese invention derived from Kanji (see Fig. 3), as a means of representing words and parts of speech having no direct Chinese equivalent. During the early period of Japanese literary history, female writers used Kana almost exclusively, while male writers used Kanji.
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