Man'yōgana
/maɲ.joː.ɡa.na/noun
A system of writing Japanese sounds using Chinese characters for their phonetic values, used before the development of kana syllabaries.
Did you know?The Man'yōshū uses these characters phonetically so flexibly that the same Japanese sound could be represented by many different Chinese characters, making writing partly a visual code and partly a sound spell.
Etymological Timeline
Ancient China
Chinese
漢字
“Chinese characters, literally associated with the Han Chinese”
6th–7th Century
Classical Japanese
漢字の音仮名
“Chinese characters used as phonetic substitutes for Japanese sounds”
8th Century
Old Japanese
万葉仮名
“The established writing practice using characters for their sounds in texts such as the Man'yōshū”
8th Century
Old Japanese
万葉集
“Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves, the major anthology whose title gave the system its modern name”
9th–10th Century
Japanese
仮名
“Borrowed or provisional names; the broader term that later referred to phonetic Japanese scripts”
Modern English
English
Man'yōgana
“The scholarly romanization for the pre-kana phonetic use of Chinese characters in Japanese”