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Japanese writing is divided into four styles: two syllabifies, hiragana
(literal meaning: "flat/plain kana") and katakana; the Chinese
characters known as kanji; and alphabetic letters known as romaji ("Roman
characters"). As the alphabet, hiragana can be used for transliteration, a
method to represent one language by the alphabet of another language.
Hiragana is nearly 100% phonetic and it is used mainly for
representing words native to Japanese (such as "ねこ" ("neko"), which means
cat) or borrowed centuries ago from Chinese (such as "めん" ("men"), which
means noodles). It is also used for particles (two of which have
non-phonetic pronunciations) and verb endings. To write foreign or
onomatopoeic words, katakana is used. However, to give a "cute" appearance,
or for text for very young children, hiragana is very often used in place of
katakana. It is made of 46 characters, which consist mostly of vowels and
vowel-consonant combinations such as "ka" or "hi", but includes one symbol
for a lone consonant, which sounds like the English "m" or "n"*. Two
diacritics plus the use of digraphs greatly increase the number of possible
sounds.
Hiragana developed from man'yo-gana (man'yougana), Chinese characters
used exclusively for their pronunciations, a practice which started in the
5th century CE. Literature was written using these characters, and as the
forms of the man'yo-gana became simplified (flattened), the hiragana came in
to existence, used mainly by women.
Hiragana was not accepted by everyone. Many felt that the language of
the educated was still Chinese. However it gained in popularity among women
as they were not allowed access to higher education. In fact, The Tale of
Genji and other novels were written by female authors using hiragana
extensively or exclusively. In modern times, it has become preferred over
katakana, which is now relegated to special uses such as borrowed words and
names in transliteration.
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