Manyogana
| Man'yōgana 万葉仮名 |
|
|---|---|
| Type | |
| Languages | Japanese and Okinawan |
|
Time period
|
c. 650 CE to Meiji era |
|
Parent systems
|
Oracle Bone Script
|
|
Child systems
|
Hiragana, katakana |
|
Sister systems
|
Contemporary kanji |
Man'yōgana (?) is an ancient writing system that employs Chinese characters to represent the Japanese language and was the first known kana system to be developed as a means to represent the Japanese language phonetically. The date of the earliest usage of this type of kana is not clear, but it was in use since at least the mid seventh century. The name "man'yōgana" is from the Man'yōshū, a Japanese poetry anthology from the Nara period written in man'yōgana.
A possible oldest example of Man'yōgana is the iron Inariyama Sword that was excavated at the Inariyama Kofun in 1968. In 1978, X-ray analysis revealed a gold-inlaid inscription consisting of at least 115 Chinese characters and this text, written in Chinese, included Japanese personal names which were supposedly phonetically written. This sword is thought to have been made in the year 辛亥年 (471 A.D. in commonly accepted theory). There is a possibility that the inscription of the Inariyama sword may be written in a version of the Chinese language used in the Korean-peninsula kingdom of Baekje.
Man'yōgana uses kanji characters for their phonetic rather than semantic qualities—in other words, they are used for their sounds and not their meanings. There was no standard system for choice of kanji; different kanji could represent a similar sound, the choice made on the whims of the writer. By the end of the 8th century, 970 kanji were in use to represent the 90 morae of Japanese, far more than what was needed. For example, the Man'yōshū poem 17/4025 was written as follows:
The sounds mo (母, 毛) and shi (之, 思) are written with multiple characters. While all particles and most words are represented phonetically (多太 tada, 安佐 asa), the words umi (海) and funekaji (船梶) are rendered semantically.
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Wikipedia