For future reference.
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED043872
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED043872
The Influence of Sanskrit on the Japanese Sound Systems.
Buck, James H.
The
Japanese syllabary of today would probably not exist in its present
arrangement had it not been for Sanskrit studies in Japan. Scholars of
ancient Japan extracted from the Devanagari those sounds which
corresponded to sounds in Japanese and arranged the Japanese syllabary
in the devanagari order. First appearing in a document dated 1204, this
arrangement has been fixed since the 17th century. This arrangement was
most convenient for the study of Sanskrit and was later applied by
scholars of the history of the Japanese language. It was a convenient
means to order information and perhaps, even, its early use has a
parallel in the earliest English dictionaries which were arranged
according to our present alphabet, but whose major purpose was the study
of a foreign language. For the English, it was Latin; for the
Japanese, it was Sanskrit. (Author/AMM)
Note: Presented at the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics, University of North Carolina, April 17-18, 1970
