Whats the Hiragana?

Japanese Hiragana

Origin
Hiragana syllables developed from Chinese characters, as shown below. Hiragana were originally called onnade or 'women's hand' as were used mainly by women - men wrote in kanji and katakana. By the 10th century, hiragana were used by everybody. The word hiragana means "oridinary syllabic script".

In early versions of hiragana there were often many different characters to represent the same syllable, however the system was eventually simplified so that there was a one-to-one relationship between spoken and written syllables. The present orthography of hiragana was codified by the Japanese government in 1946.

The hiragana syllabary
In each column the rōmaji appears on the left, the hiragana symbols in the middle and the kanji from which they developed on the right. There is some dispute about which kanji the hiragana developed from.