Manyogana facts for kids

Man'yōgana is the oldest way people in Japan wrote down sounds. It's like an early alphabet for the Japanese language.

Long ago, around the 4th century AD, Chinese characters (called kanji in Japan) arrived in Japan from the Korean Peninsula. At first, these characters were only used to write the Chinese language.

Even though Japanese people didn't speak Chinese, rich and educated Japanese people studied Chinese writings a lot. Later, around the 6th century AD, they started using these Chinese characters to write Japanese words for the first time. However, this new way of writing Japanese was still very much like Chinese.

Why Japanese Writing Was Hard to Create

It was very difficult to use Chinese characters to write Japanese. This is because Chinese and Japanese languages are very different.

For example, Chinese uses an SVO word order. This means the sentence goes Subject-Verb-Object, like "I eat sushi." But Japanese uses an SOV word order: Subject-Object-Verb, like "I sushi eat."

Also, Chinese words often have just one syllable. These are called monosyllabic words. A morpheme is the smallest part of a word that has meaning. Japanese words, however, often have two or more syllables. These are called polysyllabic words.

Let's look at some examples:

In Mandarin Chinese, the words for "mountain," "fish," "middle," "country," "person," "many," "fast," and "see" are all one syllable. But in Japanese, their native pronunciations are "yama," "sakana," "naka," "kuni," "hito," "oo," "haya," and "mi(ru)." These all have two or more syllables.

How Grammar Works in Japanese

Chinese is an analytic language. This means its grammar is mostly shown by the order of words. But Japanese is highly inflectional. This means grammar is shown by changing the endings of words.

Because of this, Japanese verbs, adjectives, and adverbs usually have at least two parts. The first part is the main meaning, called the derivational morpheme. The other parts added to the end are called inflectional morphemes. They show how the word is used in a sentence.

For example, the word for "to see" is 見る (mi(ru)). The kanji 見 (mi) means "see." The ending ru shows that it's a verb.

Another example is the adjective 多い (oo(i)), meaning "many." The part 多 (oo) means "many," and the i ending shows it's an adjective.

The words 速い (haya(i)) and 速く (haya(ku)) both use 速 (haya) meaning "fast." The i in 速い makes it an adjective ("fast"). The ku in 速く makes it an adverb ("quickly").

Man'yōgana: Writing Sounds with Kanji

Because Chinese and Japanese were so different, the Japanese had to change how they used Chinese characters. Their first idea was to use Chinese characters only for their sound, not for their meaning. These characters were called man'yōgana.

Man'yōgana got its name from the Man'yōshu. This was a famous collection of Japanese poems written using man'yōgana. While Chinese characters used for their meaning became known as kanji, those used only for sounds became man'yōgana.

Man'yōgana used about 970 Chinese characters. These characters could represent the roughly 90 different morae (sound units) in the Japanese language.

For example, the character 山 means "mountain" in Japanese. But this character was usually used for Chinese loanwords. These are words borrowed from Chinese. Examples include 富士山 (Fuji-san, "Mt. Fuji"), 火山 (kazan, "volcano"), and 山村 (sanson, "mountain village").

Words borrowed from Chinese use on'yomi. These are pronunciations borrowed from Chinese. Native Japanese words use kun'yomi, which are native Japanese pronunciations.

In early Japanese writing, native Japanese words were often written using man'yōgana. For example, the kanji for "mountain" is 山, and its native Japanese pronunciation (kun'yomi) is yama. But to show it was a native Japanese word and not a Chinese loanword (called kango), yama would be written as 耶麻, 八馬, 矢間, or 也麻 using man'yōgana.

A modern Japanese sentence like "I eat sushi" (私はすしを食べます, Watashi-wa sushi-o tabemasu) would look very different in man'yōgana. If written entirely in man'yōgana, it could be 和多氏巴寿司鳥他邊麻須. This makes it look more like Chinese.

From Man'yōgana to Kana

Even though man'yōgana helped Japanese people write their spoken language, it was very hard to read. Since Chinese characters were used for both meaning and sound, it caused a lot of confusion. The example sentences above would be hard for even a native Japanese speaker to read today.

Also, writing with man'yōgana was very slow. You needed to write a whole Chinese character for just one Japanese syllable. Some of these characters could take up to 30 pen strokes!

To write faster and more easily, Japanese writers created simpler characters called kana. These characters represent Japanese syllables.

Buddhist monks created katakana by using only parts of kanji. This helped them write down teachings more quickly. Upper-class women created hiragana by writing kanji in a flowing, cursive style.

Katakana and hiragana were created separately, but they eventually replaced man'yōgana. Today, most sound-based Japanese writing uses hiragana and katakana.

However, man'yōgana is still used for some modern Japanese words. These are called ateji. Some examples include 寿司 (sushi), 亜細亜 (Ajia, Asia), 亜米利加 (Amerika, America), 仏蘭西 (Furansu, France), 阿弗利加 (Afurika, Africa), 沢山 (takusan, many), and 珈琲 (kōhī, coffee).

Sometimes, ateji are old spellings for place names, like 仏蘭西 for France. Later, Japanese decided to write all non-Chinese loanwords with katakana.

Other times, ateji are used because the Chinese characters are known in other countries. For example, Chinese can recognize 寿司 (sushi) because both characters exist in Chinese. They might not recognize すし, as those characters are not Chinese. For "coffee," the Chinese characters are 咖啡. The Japanese 珈琲 is similar enough that Chinese speakers might guess its meaning.

See also

In Spanish: Man'yōgana para niños