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The habit of using katakana and hiragana without any standardization regarding form continued until 1900, when, for the first time, the shape for each symbol was standardized by a government decree. A set of 46 symbols for hiragana and another set of 46 for katakana were chosen. Today, for instance, カ is the only standard katakana rendition of the sound /ka/. The hiragana し, which is a cursive equivalent of 之, represents the sound /si/. Other shorthand katakana symbols used through history are no longer used. However, other man'yōgana and especially their cursive versions are still used today in calligraphic writing of poems. Man'yōgana appearing in this context are called hentaigana. Hiragana and katakana overlap each other in function in that they are both capable of representing all Japanese sounds equally efficiently, but in today's writing they are used differently. As discussed elsewhere, katakana are used for mimesis, foreign names, names of fauna and flora, etc., while hiragana are used to write function words and inflectional endings.
Reading Kanji
Even after learning about the development of syllabaries in Japanese, one may still wonder about how Chinese characters became assimilated into the Japanese language. Recall from above the cases of 月 and 潮. Now consider a Chinese character 山, which means "mountain". In Chinese, this character had the pronunciation [shan]. When this character was brought into Japanese, the character retained the same meaning, but its pronunciation changed to /san/ so that it would fit into the sound pattern of the Japanese language. The meaning of this character also corresponded to a native Japanese word yama "mountain". As a result, the character 山 became associated with two pronunciations—/san/ from the Chinese [shan], and /yama/ from the Japanese word for "mountain". In other words, the character 山 would now have two ways of being pronounced: /san/ and /yama/—one of Chinese origin and another of Japanese origin, but with both referring to "mountain". This is the case with the majority of Japanese kanji. There are ordinarily both Chinese and Japanese readings. The Chinese reading is referred to as the on reading—the sound reading, sound value of it—and the Japanese reading is referred to as the kun reading, representing its semantic value. Typically, then, a kanji may have several ways of being pronounced. Which pronunciation to choose depends on how it is used in a word: on reading when appearing as part of a Chinese compound, or kun reading when appearing as part of a native Japanese word or compound.
Thus there are situations in which the same kanji may be read in different ways depending on the context in which it appears. Take, for example, the character 生. In Chinese, this character basically means "life" or "come to life," and it has a single reading [sheng]. When it was brought into Japanese, however, it was applied to an array of words with many different readings: 生かす /i-kasu/ 'let live', 生う /o-u/ 'grow', 生える /ha-eru/ 'grow', 生む /u-mu/ 'give birth', 生まれる /u-mareru/ 'be born' and others. From these examples, we can see that this character 生 can be read as /i, o, ha, u/. These are readings in addition to the on readings of this character, which are /sei/ and /shō/.
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