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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. The date of the earliest usage of this type of ...
Kanbun, literally "Chinese writing," refers to a genre of techniques for making Chinese texts read like Japanese, or for writing in a way imitative of Chinese. For a Japanese, neither of these tasks could be accomplished easily because of the two languages' different structures. As I have mentioned, Chinese is an isolating language.
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
' explanatory reading ' [1] [a]) is the way of reading kanji characters using the native Japanese word that matches the meaning of the Chinese character when it was introduced. [2] [3] [4] This pronunciation is contrasted with on'yomi, which is the reading based on the original Chinese pronunciation of the character.
A morphogram is the representation of a morpheme by a grapheme based solely on its meaning. Kanji is a writing system that makes use of morphograms, where Chinese characters were borrowed to represent native morphemes because of their meanings. Thus, a single character can represent a variety of morphemes which originally all had the same meaning.
As a result of the aforementioned lack of a Japanese writing system, Chinese was used almost exclusively in texts. The Heian period (794–1185) facilitated the emergence of a system known as kanbun , which involved the use of Chinese text with diacritical marks that allowed Japanese speakers to read and restructure Chinese sentences.
Wasei-kango (Japanese: 和製漢語, "Japanese-made Chinese words") are those words in the Japanese language composed of Chinese morphemes but invented in Japan rather than borrowed from China. Such terms are generally written using kanji and read according to the on'yomi pronunciations of the characters.
In some cases, the Chinese reading is the inferred Chinese reading, interpreting the character as a phono-semantic compound (as in how on readings are sometimes assigned to these characters in Chinese), while, in other cases (such as 働), the Japanese on reading is borrowed (in general this differs from the modern Chinese pronunciation of this ...