http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet

Wikipedia Wrote:"By 2700 BCE the ancient Egyptians had developed a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent the individual consonants of their language, plus a 23rd that seems to have represented word-initial or word-final vowels. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names. However, although alphabetic in nature, the system was not used for purely alphabetic writing except when transcribing foreign names. That is, while capable of being used as an alphabet, it was in fact nearly always used with a strong logographic component, presumably due to strong cultural attachment to the complex Egyptian script."

And 5000 years later, here we go again

Here is another example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_cuneiform

Wikipedia Wrote:"Hittite orthography was directly adapted from Old Assyrian cuneiform. The HZL of Rüster and Neu lists 375 cuneiform signs used in Hittite documents (11 of them only appearing in Hurrian and Hattic glosses), compared to some 600 signs in use in Old Assyrian. About half of the signs have syllabic values, the remaining are used as ideograms or logograms to represent the entire word -- much as the characters "$", "%" and "&" are used in contemporary English.

Cuneiform signs can be employed in three functions: syllabograms, Akkadograms or Sumerograms. Syllabograms are characters that represent a syllable. Akkadograms and Sumerograms are ideograms originally from the earlier Akkadian or Sumerian orthography respectively, but not intended to be pronounced as in the original language; Sumerograms are mostly ideograms and determiners."

Apparently the Japanese weren't the first people to borrow a logographic writing system from a neighbouring unrelated language and adapt it to their own language.

Mayan writing was likewise partly logographic and partly phonetic. Korean writing is, too, though the use of hanja (Korean word for kanji) is dying out, and unlike hiragana and katakana, the hangul alphabet wasn't derived from Chinese characters (though their square shape was likely inspired by them).

You might find this interesting: http://books.google.com/books?id=kmKLxzT...22&f=false

I don't think it's that incredible...the people of 4000+ years ago weren't apes. They were like us. If you consider your own extensive life experiences and the thought processes of which you are routinely capable, it would almost be expected to find things of that sort back then.