@hongminhee No, no, it's wrong to unify Han if we still haven't unified the Latin 'A', the Greek 'Α', and the Cyrillic 'А' with the Gothic '𐌰', the Coptic 'Ⲁ', the Hebrew 'א', the Fraktur '𝔄', and the Japanese 'あ’。
@xarvos If you look closely, you'll notice that both the Latin and Cyrillic ones are derived from the Greek one, which, in turn, is derived from the Foenician one, which is derived from something close to the Hebrew one.
Similarly, either the Foenician or an early Greek version became an early Brahmic version, whence (admittedly, through some pretty heavy reshuffling) eventually the Dewanagari अ came from. Japanese あ is probably redrawn, but the arrangement of kana is very clearly derived from Dewanagari, probably brought in by the same people who brought Buddhism to Japan. They are all related. Probably to the alphabetic subsystem of Hieratic Egyptian, too, but outside the animal pictures, I'm not really fluent in Egyptian.
@riley @hongminhee あ coming from devanagari is a stretch. the entire kana (both ones) are derived from chinese characters
@xarvos Why do you suppose the 五十音 table doesn't look at all like 注音符號 table, but does markedly resemble common renderings of the वर्णमाला table?
@riley The reason bopomofo and Japanese kana look so different from each other is because each letter comes from a different Chinese character.
The resemblance between Japanese Kana and Devanagari is, well, either a coincidence or you have weird eyes, because they don't look anything alike to me.
If you don't know anything about Chinese characters or East Asian scripts, please don't make any more unreasonable claims.
@hongminhee @riley @xarvos The individual hiragana characters have no Indic origin. Its usual arrangement あ-か-さ-た-... ([vowel only]-k-s-t-...) resembles how Sanskrit characters are conventionally arranged in a table. This resemblance is believed to derive from works written by Japanese Buddhists who studied texts originally from India.
https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/ja/features/z1304_00195.html
@pot Most of the character shapes in kanaare probably redrawn, not borrowed from a Brahmic script. Somebody probably picked a bunch of kanji, and pulled the standard rebus trick on them that people have been doing since time immemorial when building a phonetic script out of the concepts of a logographic script, in order to get characters that made sense in the Japanese context. But the character inventory is based on something closely related to Dewanagari.
@riley @hongminhee @xarvos It's well attested that kana's shapes changed gradually from kanji, older ones are much closer to kanji than currrently used ones, and it ultimetly goes back to man'yogana (万葉仮名). I'm not aware of any evidence to suggest Brahmic influence to man'yogana.
@pot Pay careful attention to the 51th sound of the 50-sound table: the venerable terminal 'ん'. Separating the terminal sound of a syllable into a distinct letter while keeping the preceding consonant and vowel together doesn't make sense in any of the major Chinese ways of syllabic word composition analysis, with the possible exception of the new linguistic ideas brought in by the Yuan dynasty, which I'm not particularly familiar with. Neither bopomofo nor fanqie does that. But it's relatively natural outcome of applying the common Brahmic way of building an abugida — rather than a syllabary — to the Japanese syllable composition.
@hongminhee @xarvos