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Man'yōgana (万葉仮名, Japanese pronunciation: [maɰ̃joꜜːɡana] or [maɰ̃joːɡana]) is an ancient writing system that uses Chinese characters to represent the Japanese language. It was the first known kana system to be developed as a means to represent the Japanese language phonetically.
Manyogana. Man'yōgana is the oldest known sound-based writing system used for the Japanese language. When kanji, or Chinese characters used to write Japanese, first came to Japan in around the 4th century AD through the Korean Peninsula, it was only used to write the Chinese language. [1] Even though Chinese was not native to the Japanese ...
Man'yōgana ( 万葉仮名 ), also known as shakuji ( 借字 ), is an obsolete form of kana in which kanji were used for their sounds rather than their meanings. It is the oldest native Japanese writing system, dating to circa 759. In this system, kanji were used for their pronunciation as well as meaning.
Early Middle Japanese was written in three different ways. It was first recorded in Man'yōgana (万葉仮名), literally "ten thousand leaves borrowed labels", in reference to the Man'yōshū poetry anthology and the "borrowing" of the kanji characters as "labels" for the sounds of Japanese.
In hiragana. One such adaptation was man’yōgana, a phonetic syllabary that came into use in the 8th century. This system used Chinese characters whose Chinese pronunciation sounded similar to Japanese syllables, rather than using the ideas that the characters represented.
Japanese language writing development. In Japanese art: Calligraphy and painting. …of Chinese characters, known as man’yōgana, were employed to represent Japanese phonetic sounds, and two even more abbreviated phonetic writing systems, hiragana and katakana, were known in nascent form.
Hiragana developed from man'yōgana, Chinese characters used for their pronunciations, a practice that started in the 5th century. The oldest examples of Man'yōgana include the Inariyama Sword , an iron sword excavated at the Inariyama Kofun.
