YES #Hiragana is derived from cursive forms of #Hanzi and #Kanji !
okay yes I borrowed this from Wikipedia but many thanks to the creators of the diagram and the comments are all mine!
Now remember that Japanese is not Sinitic. Most words are polysyllabic and verbs .... well Japanese verbs especially in literary forms tend to be L O O O N G.
When the Japanese borrowed Chinese characters Chinese writing had already developed several ways to write down characters, small seal script, clerical script , running script, and other variants. however Chinese lacked a method for for indicating tones or dialectal variations of pronounciation.
The Japanese scholars who visited China often wee also studying Buddhism and were aware that Sanskrit was written with characters that rendered syllables, a knowledge of which was very important in Tantric Buddhist rituals for the Tendai and Shingon sects and for Sutra reciting generally.
Plus along writing poetry in Chinese lots of people were creating poetry in Japanese.
Teaching everyone Sanskrit would not have been a good solution.
They needed a script form that could help people learn Chinese characters, was easy to write with a brush, and had as few signs as possible to learn and remember.
Now scroll back up to that chart.
They're all quite common words and they can be written with usually just one continuous brush stroke in the cursive form of the hanzi/kanji and likewise in HIRAGANA!
One wonders what would have happened if some unorthodox Chinese scholar had seen a visiting Japanese student adding notes in kana as he copied a text and had the idea of using kana to record his personal dialect or some non Sinitic minority language like Mongol or one of the frontier turkic languages?
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