manygana

Man’yōgana, sometimes romanized Manyōgana, is an ancient Japanese writing system in which Chinese characters (kanji) are used to represent the phonetic values of Japanese syllables rather than their semantic meaning. It developed in the 5th to 8th centuries and is named after the Man'yōshū, the oldest extant collection of Japanese poetry, which documents its extensive use.

Under man’yōgana, scribes selected kanji for their sounds, often using on’yomi readings and occasionally kun’yomi readings to spell out Japanese words and inflections. Since a single kanji can have multiple readings, a single syllable could be written with several different characters depending on the desired meaning or literary effect. A large repertoire of kanji provided symbols for the many syllables of early Japanese, especially in poetic composition.

Man’yōgana gradually gave way to more regular phonetic scripts: hiragana and katakana. These scripts derive from simplified or abbreviated forms of man’yōgana and, by the Heian period, had largely supplanted it for most writing. Hiragana came to serve mainly native Japanese words and grammar, while katakana was used for annotations and foreign or technical terms.

Because it writes Japanese phonology using Chinese characters, man’yōgana offers valuable data for historical linguists studying Old Japanese and its transition to the modern kana systems. See also: kana, hiragana, katakana, Man’yōshū.