Reflections on the Adaptation of Orthographic Scripts Between Cuneiform and Kana: From Logogram to Phonogram

要旨

Cuneiform and Kana are representative in the scope of the world's writing system more ancient text system, both are derived from hieroglyphs, their prototype was the early Sumerian pictographs and Chinese characters, the two writing systems are different depending on nationalities and different language users used to record more language, which had a profound impact on Mesopotamia and east Asia civilization.Among them, the formed cuneiform script as a pure phonetic text is used to record Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite and Old Persian, these involve other Semitic and Indo-European as well; with the introduction of Chinese characters from the Korean Peninsula, the almost unrelated Japanese absorbed Chinese logograms.The early Japanese users tried to use the combination of logograms and phonograms, with thousands of years of adaptation, which finally formed the modern Japanese writing system, namely Japanese characters (kanji), hiragana and katakana.Therefore, the two writing systems share many similarities, but the same intention used for the record pronunciations leads to two developing modes in different directions, which is worth discussing.This paper will try to discuss the features of two writing systems, phonetic features and morphological structure of those languages that used cuneiform and kana, and possible nonlinguistic factors, aiming to provide a profound point of view on the relationship between logograms and phonograms.

主題