Anyone know of a resource where one can see which kanji spawned which kana? I know some are quite obvious (世/せ, 力/か), but I read the other day that 部 was the starting point for へ, which kind of shocked me. It made me curious about the rest.

Any help?

Google
Wikipedia
RTK 2
most JPN textbooks

Heisg's Remembering The Kana books have what you're looking for.

One of the 世界史 or 日本史 episodes here talked about 万葉仮名 and how the modern writing system came about, but I don't remember which one. Might be interesting anyway. Otherwise wiki it.

Speaking of Wikipedia, there's a link at the bottom of the article about hentaigana that's a link to a scanned index (in PDF format) of cursive kana (and their kanji parents), but it really only covers katakana. There's a pretty good chart on the discussion page with both though.

Honestly?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kana#History

Meh, just sharing what I know :/ I didn't think to check that article (yeah, pretty stupid on my part).

Thanks for the answers everybody (except jajaaan).

And atylmo, thanks to you, too. Don't be sorry I didn't think to look there either.

atylmo Wrote:Meh, just sharing what I know :/ I didn't think to check that article (yeah, pretty stupid on my part).

I didn't mean to imply that your post was bad. I'm always a little perplexed when someone decides to start a forum thread on a topic that could easily be entered into Google and they'd have the top 10 results of about 2,090,000 in exactly 0.25 seconds. Just feels like cheating to provide a direct link, but oh well. (The "Honestly?" wasn't in response to you, in other words.)

What's wrong with wanting a direct link? Are you paying the hosting bill here or something?

sethg Wrote:What's wrong with wanting a direct link? Are you paying the hosting bill here or something?

You're right. I'm wrong. Sorry for helping you out.

Heh, sorry jajaaan I take stuff waaaay too personally sometimes.

sethg Wrote:Anyone know of a resource where one can see which kanji spawned which kana? I know some are quite obvious (世/せ, 力/か), but I read the other day that 部 was the starting point for へ, which kind of shocked me. It made me curious about the rest.

This is my web page on that topic: http://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/originofkana.html

I'd welcome corrections or comments.