Talk:General Discussion/@comment-25034194-20140623125703/@comment-16545476-20140624152736

>>Which btw, was quite a weird thing for them to have done given that they actually have a syllabic language better expressed with an alphabet.

Well.....actually Hiragana and Katakana both derived from chinese characters. The Japanese were using chinese characters at first, and Kanji was usually used by elites. Hiragana at first was used by women (that were less educated by the time) or personal writings, and Katakana was used by monks as reading guide marks.

So frankly speaking, Japanese syllabary was heavily influenced by chinese characters.