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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 ...
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 ...
Old Japanese is usually defined as the language of the Nara period (710–794), when the capital was Heijō-kyō (now Nara ). [1] [2] That is the period of the earliest connected texts in Japanese, the 112 songs included in the Kojiki (712). The other major literary sources of the period are the 128 songs included in the Nihon Shoki (720) and ...
Kanji (漢字, Japanese pronunciation: [kaɲdʑi]) are the logographic Chinese characters adapted from the Chinese script used in the writing of Japanese. [1] They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequently-derived syllabic scripts of hiragana and katakana.
In addition to its artistic merits, the Man'yōshū is significant for using the earliest Japanese writing system, the cumbersome man'yōgana. Though it was by no means the first use of this writing system—which was used to compose the Kojiki (712), [26] —it was influential enough to give the writing system its modern name, as man'yōgana ...
Classical Japanese. The classical Japanese language ( 文語, bungo, "literary language"), also called "old writing" (古文, kobun) and sometimes simply called "Medieval Japanese", is the literary form of the Japanese language that was the standard until the early Shōwa period (1926–1989). It is based on Early Middle Japanese, the language ...
Egyptian hieroglyphs, examples of logograms. In a written language, a logogram (from Ancient Greek logos 'word', and gramma 'that which is drawn or written'), also logograph or lexigraph, is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme. Chinese characters as used in Chinese as well as other ...
Katakana (片仮名, fragmented kana) or gojūongana (五十音仮名, fifty-sound kana): a syllabary derived by using bits of characters in man'yōgana, historically sorted in gojūon order. Yamatogana (大和仮名, Yamato's kana): hiragana and katakana, as opposed to kanji. Ongana (音仮名, sound kana): magana for transcribing Japanese ...