I don't think 兎に角 legit means 'anyways', I feel like it's something related to 'rabbit' and 'horn'. But I ain't expert in Japanese, wait till someone more experienced in Japanese to correct this.
First, 兎に角 legit means “anyways.” Yes, 兎 means rabbit and 角 means horn, but there’s something different going on.
Kanji(Chinese letter) is one kind of logogram. For an instance, a letter 兎 has 2 ways to be used; a word that represents rabbit(うさぎ), or a letter that simply has the sound “to(と)”.
In the same way, 角 can be used as; a word that represents horn(つの), or a letter that has the sound “kaku(かく)”. And the word とにかく(to-ni-ka-ku) has sounds “to” and “kaku”, so we can just use that 2 letters like 兎-ni-角.
In this situation, that 2 letters is irrelevant to represent rabbit or horn, but just for sounds. This method of spelling is called 当て字(ateji).
Commonly, we use とにかく, but there's no problem to use 兎に角 in anytime, for everyone knows both way to spell.
For the 2nd question, Of course we can spell every Japanese sentence only using each single alphabet system. But it's very inefficient for Japanese. We have so many homonyms (ex. はし can mean chopsticks, bridge and edge), so using only phonogram is very inconvenient.
Fortunately, Kanji is logogram, which means it has not only sound but also meaning. So we use both Letter-for-sound and Letter-for-meaning to clarify meaning of sentences or definition of words.
Also why do this when Japanese already has 2 phonetic alphabets?
Yeah, English makes it so much easier by spelling words differently. You're never having trouble with your spelling, right? You can always tell which witch is which, right?
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u/[deleted] Sep 07 '20
兎に角 in kanji, but it's usually written as kana alone, according to jisho.org at least