In the past there was almost always some type of restriction on women's learning compared to men(Yes I know this was...

In the past there was almost always some type of restriction on women's learning compared to men(Yes I know this was only within upper class but that's not even my point).
In early Japan, this was taken to the next level by having a writing system that only each gender could use. Hiragana(a later development) for women and kanji + katakana for men. How long were these technicalities enforced and to what level?
Was it literally such that "only women/men could write in the respective ways or was it to the point where it was the only thing they could learn how to read as well(more in the case of women)? Did these restrictions last into the Edo period or end in the heian period(where it kind started). Sorry if I sound ignorant, I don't know that exact differences between the two kana writing systems so Forgive me if I may be overlooking something. Any expert opinions would be welcome.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanbun,
twitter.com/AnonBabble

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So let me get this straight.
> actually follow the rulesa post a history relevant thread that is pretty well thought out save one typo and it gets no replies.
> user's shiposting with race bait, videogame, and haplotype threads, yet I can't get a single contributer will to at least support or reject the idea with a reasonable argument.
I just want you people who complain about Veeky Forums to know that you're part of the problem.

I mean, it's interesting, but I don't know anything about it. We just have to wait for some Japmasters.
Hell, ask /jp/. Though your thread might get deleted.

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I'll rather not go on /jp/ and get accosted by weaboos. I guess I'll wait for the language master/east Asian history masters.

bump for history and linguistics

Leave it to the Japanese to take gender separation to autistic heights.

kek.
Anyway, my dilemma is that I may actually be overexaggerating the differences of katakana and hiragana due to my inexperience. I read once, the latter is SORT OF like cursive(more squiggly lines). Was it such that the differences was like Latin alphabet vs English, Greek vs. English, or just cursive vs. print?
Jokes aside, I think men having the right to learn kanji was similar to them just being able to have more education in general. More time learning grammar and lit basically; more schooling.
And of course, I want to know how long this difference was strongly enforced.

>In early Japan, this was taken to the next level by having a writing system that only each gender could use. Hiragana(a later development) for women and kanji + katakana for men. How long were these technicalities enforced and to what level?

I'm no expert on the topic but my understanding is that these two developed differently and had nothing to do with the writing system of the time.

Women weren't allowed to study Chinese characters and as such ended up developing Hiragana to write their poems and what not down.

Katakana came about through the Buddhist monks and its purpose was to help out in learning the various spellings of the characters. They were relegated to this role and did not serve any other purpose.

The way to write Japanese all the way up to the 20th century was a system where you write in Chinese, then mark down where each of the characters should go in the actual Japanese sentence.

Imagine Irish used English that kept the Celtic VSO order and used the Japanese system to write. They'd write "I↓ went↑ home". Yes, it's bonkers and requires you to know Chinese. That's the beauty of the system and probably one of the reasons why Japanese writing system is still a pretty hot mess even today.
The system is called Kanbun en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanbun, if you want to read more about it.

TL;DR: Hiragana is used by women because they simply couldn't find a teacher willing to do it. Katakana is used by no one, it's only ever used as an aide. Text is written using Chinese characters only and is actually in Chinese itself.

Literally why though.
>Nips considered Chinese classical culture as high culture.
>Women and men could read/write in Chinkscript. Doubly so for members of aristocracy.
>Japs: Lolno.

women were often not able to part take in the same activities as men because the have girl kooties or something. Nothing new here.

Because no one here actually has relevant historical knowledge for subjects other than shitposting.

ah I see. So basically one of the kana systems was made so women could still be able to write messages down if they want without higher learning of kanji. Meanwhile, the other was just a way to help with writing kanji /getting around it. I also read that katakana is used these days just for loan words and emphasis. It make sense if it's primary function was just an aide for Kanji. It makes even more sense that it should be called men's hand since only men were able to learn kanji anyway.
Basically both were created so people wouldn't have to dabble so much with kanji lol.
So were men allowed to learn to read Hiragana then, even if they didn't write it?
That way they could understand what women were writing down or was the goal to just not give a shit what women write because" it's probably not important?" Until of course Murasaki wrote Genji.

>Women weren't allowed to study Chinese characters and as such ended up developing Hiragana to write their poems and what not down.
>Katakana came about through the Buddhist monks and its purpose was to help out in learning the various spellings of the characters.
Both scripts were developed by Buddhist monks. Hiragana was adopted by women because it was developed from a cursive Chinese script which women were are allowed to learn and use.

As I said, I'm no expert on the subject so if any corrections are needed, I welcome them with open arms.

Going off of user's comment, I doubt they wouldn't understand it. After all, women created the bulk of the info on the era itself, so they must have had some sort of audience for it (since it was preserved and all).

Didn´t japanese women also spoke in a different way?
Japs said japanese speaking westerners spoke like women because they learned their vocabulary mostly from whores

Was it just because it was cursive or because it was a simplified as well? That's what my understanding of the point of these kana scripts in the first place: to make kanji easier or to lift the burden it created.

uh slightly. Japanese was still mostly Japanese though. The issue was the writing. I thonk you mean in terms of certain articles or subject uses. I believe there is a masculine and feminine way to refer to yourself in Japanese much like there are masculine and feminine nouns in french and spanish. Though everyone may use it. This may be taken to another level in Japanese in some ways. Again, Im not very learned on the language.

They still use different words and phrases today, but that's normal among languages.
If anything, English is one of the odd ones out which don't make the gender of the person in question apparent.

It's not a different language, just different ways to refer to oneself, use of some cutesy/childish forms and so on.
Just like slavic languages add "-a" at the end of the verbs if the speaker is female.

btw, I know great works of literature were eventually written in Hiragana. I mentioned one in that comment(Genji). That was the point when Hiragana started to be taken very seriously to the point that it would eventually be a major part of the language.
I was asking in regards to before that. Did men bother to at least learn to read women's script in the beginning. You know to be privy to what women were writing/saying? I would hope so because how the hell would men and women be able to communicate when they weren't talking? Did they just not? What if women were talking shit about them? How would they know lol? Just saying.

Love letters were a thing in Heian aristocracy and writing a love letter the recipient can't read does not seem like a good idea.

yeah that's what I was getting at in my comment to him but I worded it wrong. English only makes masculine and feminine distinctions of 3rd person pronouns in the singular form and never with nouns and never depending on who is speaking. French and Spanish make masculine and feminine distinctions with both singular and plural 3rd person pronouns ("they m." and "they f.") depending on the gender of the group. They also make distinction of articles( m. Le vs. f. La) and nouns that just sound feminine or masculine and thus need feminine/masculine articles. This does not depend on the speaker's gender however.
My guess is Japanese and perhaps your language, have these requirements + first person pronouns as well as change of noun gender with the gender of the speaker.
hmm I wonder how this whole transgender sjw pronoun recognition movement will affect these languages?

So men learned to read AND write all forms then, but they would only write in "women's hand" when talking to a women. And women only learned one form.
I wonder if this changed after the Heian period or stayed even into the warring states period up to Edo and Meiji era though.

>I wonder if this changed after the Heian period or stayed even into the warring states period up to Edo and Meiji era though.

Edo period spread literacy even down to peasants so it's definitely your main stopping point. These guys and gals all learned kanbun (though probably a more bastardised version), though.

Yes, but keep in mind, it was still very much a patriarchal society at that point too. That doesn't mean peasants weren't learning the same distinctions. They learned it with every other part of grammar (feminine vs. masculine words) like some anons pointed out here. So can we be sure with the writing?

The tale of Genji was written by a woman and is entirely in Chinese characters

Ive never heard of women not being allowed to learn kanji

what? No, it was written in Hiragana. Perhaps later translated to kanji and Chinese but it was originally made female kana. It is well documented historically, so I don't know what you're talking about.
In japan's earliest times women were not allowed to learn to read in write, as with other early civilizations. This changed with hiragana.

in female kana*
read and write *
my bad

>Just like slavic languages add "-a" at the end of the verbs if the speaker is female.
That's not how it goes
t. a Slav

It's a reasonable approxiamation without dumping a textbook on someone.

No it's not. There are like 20 different conjugation patterns in every language.

uh just to clarify, modern katakana is used to replicate sounds (from another languages for example) and hiragana is used for verbs, particles, nouns, adverbs etc

Thanks. One of the anons clarified.
Hiragana was basically a simplified version of kanji in cursive script and katakana was a aide in defining and reading kanji right? Do you know Japanese btw?

Hiragana: Derived from Manyougana (first batch of kanji imported from China, purely with phonetic representation), mostly used among court and literary circles. Didn't get standardized until well into the 19th century (before then you had several hiragana representing the same sound, which were used from region to region but sometimes were used in the same text as a form of creative calligraphy), after the subsequent education reforms the remaining "abnormal" forms stopped being used
Katakana: Also derived from Manyougana, but were used among religious and clerical circles. Here Manyougana was used as grammar annotation to the side of Chinese text so that it can be understandable in Japanese (see Kanbun on Wikiedia), Soon enough the characters were simplified to a few basic strokes, which became the basis of katakana. Since the environment was more rigorous, here the script was standardized much sooner, hence why it found a more widespread usage.

is that your own knowledge spammed in this post or did you just copy and paste wiki? lol Anyway thanks for answering the first part of my question. From what you said about hiragana being standardized by 19th century, I'm going to assume this segregation of women only learning hiragana went until then. Though it would be great to have some clarification. Men must have learned to read and write hiragana from the get go if they were part of court life. Then from 19th century onward, everyone learned it.

I'm a completely poster, I just wanted to make it clear that hiragana had never been a script "for women" (where did this notion even started?), the separation of usage was always along professional lines.
Both of the scripts were born out of the same necessity because writing a full-on Chinese character was a pain and they needed a faster method, they just followed different paths again just because of the professional circles they were used. Hence why in the same time period you have scrollery written in kanji+hiragana (script used in literary and artistic circles), while you have bureaucratic papers written in kanji+katakana (script used in religious and clerical circles)

The standardization I was talking about was the elimination of hentaigana so that one sound would correspond to only one hiragana character.

>hmm I wonder how this whole transgender sjw pronoun recognition movement will affect these languages?

They are already using this feature of language to encapsulate subtle meaning.

English makes masculine and feminine distinctions, but the underlying rules for this distinction is clear, and being used by English-speakers. Some people get butthurt over language changing, it's always the way.

I'm another user but I'm learning Japanese. I have a katakana test tomorrow in fact so this is interesting to know. I wish my Japanese was more advanced to help in this discussion but I'm just a beginner for now

Not "women's writing" in terms of only women can learn it, but in terms of that's the only one they could learn.
Every historical source I've seen so far sites this initial gender segregation. Women in fact wete not allowed to learn to read and write early in Japan's history. I agree with you that at the end of the day both kana were created since kanji is a pain the ass, but one of them was initially made for women as in in it was the only one they themselves could really learn. Now as you mentioned, we established IIT and I'm sure, that men obviously learned hiragana too for practical reasons of communication. Moreso, in court.
Are you telling me, women would often have bueacratic responsibilities? Of course not, hence why it was not seen as necessary for them to learn kanji and the katakana used for studying it.

English only uses distinctions in terms of 3rd person pronouns though(him, her, he, she). So it's really not that pronounced at all compared to others. I'm not sure what you're final point was, can you elaborate?

There's a similar concept in traditional Ashkenazi Jewish culture. Orthodox Jewish women didn't use to read the Torah or Talmud, so they weren't taught Hebrew. They only spoke Yiddish, which is thus called "mame-loshn," or mother tongue.

Daily reminder.

Don't you mean there are more Chinese characters? I'm sure the entirety of the Chinese language, from the past to present, has more characters.

It's ok. I've gotten some help already. In terms of historical information, if anyone has anything to add that would be most appreciated.

It was not uniquely 'for women' but it was absolutely referred to as 'womens' writing,' due to its comparative widespread usage among (noble)women compared to men.

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