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"This is a script with both sound and meaning"

some words i have recently re-discovered and with which i have rekindled a romance:
hummingbird
morsels
porcupine
crave
skitter
pumps
rush
ponytail
stem
astringent
sinister
condensation
dominate
battle
mushroom
yum

words that have lost favor with me recently:
space
feel
syllable
tail
challenge
script
descent
race
class
press
guilt
like
futile
suicide
waterproof
sorry

I tried to explain the four writing systems in Japanese today with my middle school students. I guess the basic one would be hiragana - a script that indicates different sounds arranged in syllables, which can be rearranged to form words. Katakana, the other basic script is a counterpart sound-script that looks edgier and is used only for foreign words. The third script is kanji, Chinese characters that signal both a sound and a meaning - some kanji characters are associated with multiple sounds and multiple meanings. The final script is romaji, based on the alphabet, used for the transliteration of Japanese words as well as for spelling words from English and other Latin-based languages. I guess a fifth script would be so-called Arabic numerals.

It seemed so abstract to me as I was explaining this to my students, though. "This is a script that incorporates both sound and meaning." - what does that mean? I've found that it's useful to compare hiragana and katakana to lowercase and uppercase, respectively. Is it just me, or does upper case feel more edgy, more angular, than lowercase? Partly because of the history of the usage of katakana in religious and government texts, this script always has a very "masculine" feel to it. Well, to be specific, it is the historic and persistent male domination of religious and government spheres that genders the script. In any case, I often wonder why I persist in describing katakana to my students as "more angular"...
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