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Hey guys, welcome back and welcome to 2025. And in this video/article let’s continue talking about more interesting language and culture stories. Today’s topic is about the origin of the Japanese fifty sounds system, also known as Gojūon.

What is Gojūon?

So what is 五十音 Gojūon. Literally it means fifty sounds and this is a traditional system ordering kana characters by their component phonemes, roughly analogous to alphabetical order. In fact, this is a very important chart for native Japanese speakers when learning in primary school in their childhood. At the same time this is also important for the foreigner Japanese learner when learning the Japanese Kana, which is like someone must learn the English alphabet if he wants to study English.

Then, nowadays how the kana characters are arranged in this fifty sounds system order. Now let’s see the traditional Japanese fifty sounds system chart. By the way, when we read this chart, we must read it from up to down and from right to left, which is the traditional reading and writing direction in the Sinosphere. So in this order, the first column is the farthest right column and this is the vowel column and there are 5 vowels of Japanese language. Then the first row, also it’s the toppest row where the consonants are put here. Finally we just get a chart which has 50 cells and every kana character can be put into every cell. But with the time going, some kana characters were removed so today’s fifty sounds system chart should be a little bit different from the old-school charts. But the differences were not very big.

Siddham Script [梵字（ぼんじ/Bonji）] in Japan

So how this fifty-sounds system was created in ancient time. Now let’s focus on the origin. Honestly this system had a very long history. The exact time we might not be able to find it while the time probably is the Nara period to the early part of the Heian period in around the 8th century.

When we talk about the origin of the fifty-sounds system, actually based on what I learnt, it was inspired by the Siddham alphabet. But why did this script, which was used in the Indian subcontinent, inspire the creation of this Japanese kana character’s alphabet? Actually it made sense. Because according to the book, The Chronicles of Japan(日本書紀) buddhism was finally introduced into Japan in 552 and then in the 8th century, Buddhism started to be more and more popular in Japan and at the same years, Japan had more communication with the Chinese Tang dynasty so more and more Japanese monk went to China to study Buddhism and brought the knowledge back to Japan. Meanwhile, we know that most Buddhist scriptures were written in the Siddham script so with more and more Buddhist books, knowledge, thinking were introduced in Japan, the Siddham script also came together into Japan.

Gojūon Was Created

The Siddham script was introduced into Japan and more scholars, monks could understand this script. At the same time, the Kana character system was almost mature. So according to the clues, we probably can reasonably infer that at that moment some people started to think if we could borrow the Siddham alphabet to arrange the sequencing of the Kana characters.

Siddham Alphabet vs Gojūon

Finally let’s have a look at the comparison between the Siddham alphabet and the 50 sounds system. Because at that era the Kana characters also were the tool to mark the pronunciation of Siddham script. So we can easily compare the sequencing of both script systems. When we take away the not matching letters between Siddham letters and the Japanese Kana characters, we can find that the letters in the both writing systems indeed can be matched up, except it’s seemingly that there were several letters couldn’t be matched like the column of わ/ワ and the kana ん/ン. So this may be why this column and this kana were put in the last one column and the last cell of the chart.

outro

So this is today’s video/article and thank you for watching. In the future we will continue studying the history and development of Kana characters so I think we will gradually have the development context more obvious. Hope you can like this video/article. Have a good day. See you next time. Bye!