I'm not very familiar with Japanese, but as far as I know it's not like Chinese, where there is a given set of syllables and each word is a single syllable or several of them added together.
It is my understanding that Japanese is an agglutinative language like Finnish or Turkish. Which means that words are not limited to a set of syllables. Why do they use a syllabic writing system then?
Or am I missing something?
by Furfangreich