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In Japan he was raised to the high rank of asomi, and ultimately became minister of the Right during the reign of Shotoku. *Generally spoken of as "Kibi no Mabi," and credited by tradition with the invention of the katakana syllabary. Such incidents speak eloquently of the respect paid in Japan to mental attainments and of the enlightened hospitality of China.
In confirmation of this view, a syllabary identifies the Du-azagga with the Apsu. Marduk, by virtue of his original quality as a solar deity, would naturally be pictured as coming forth from Du-azagga. In this sense the title Mar-Du-azaga, 'son of Du-azagga, is applied to him, just as he is called Mar-Apsi, the son of Apsu.
We may well suppose that the idea of wresting from the syllabary its secret of consonants and vowels, and giving to each consonantal sound a distinct sign, seemed a most cumbersome and embarrassing complication to the ancient scholars that is to say, after the time arrived when any one gave such an idea expression.
Instead of a combination of as many as ten and fifteen wedges to make one sign, we have in the Persian never more than five, and frequently only three; and instead of writing words by syllables, sounds alone were employed, and the syllabary of several hundred signs reduced to forty-two, while the ideographic style was practically abolished.
The kana is a syllabary of forty-seven letters, which by diacritical marks, may be increased to seventy. The kata-kana is the square or print form, the hira-kana is the round or "grass" character for writing.
When the cuneiform syllabary was superseded in Palestine by the so-called Phoenician alphabet we do not know. The introduction of the new script was due probably to the Hittite invasion, which separated the Semites of the West from the Semites of the East.
His cousins the Assyrians used habitually a system of writing the foundation of which was an elaborate phonetic syllabary; a system, therefore, far removed from the old crude pictograph, and in some respects much more developed than the complicated Egyptian method; yet, after all, a system that stopped short of perfection by the wide gap that separates the syllabary from the true alphabet.
A perfect syllabary, then, would require some hundred or more of symbols to represent b sounds alone; and since the sounds for c, d, f, and the rest are equally varied, the entire syllabary would run into thousands of characters, almost rivalling in complexity the Chinese system.
We can imagine them saying: "You will oblige us to use four signs instead of one to write such an elementary syllable as 'bard, for example. Out upon such endless perplexity!" Nor is such a suggestion purely gratuitous, for it is an historical fact that the old syllabary continued to be used in Babylon hundreds of years after the alphabetical system had been introduced.
Boys went to school early, and learning the cuneiform syllabary was a task that demanded no small amount of time and application, especially when it is remembered that in the case of the Semitic Babylonian this involved also acquiring a knowledge of the dead language of Sumer.
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