650 CE to the Meiji era

What is Man'yōgana？

Man'yōgana (万葉仮名) is an ancient writing system that employs Chinese characters to represent the Japanese language.

Though texts using this system also often use Chinese characters for their meaning, man'yōgana refers only to such characters when used to represent a phonetic value.

Simplified versions of man'yōgana eventually gave rise to both the hiragana and katakana scripts used in Modern Japanese.

Principles

Man'yōgana uses kanji characters for their phonetic rather than semantic qualities—in other words, they are used for their sounds and not their meanings.

Man'yōgana	之乎路可良	波久比能海
Katakana	シオジカラ	ハクヒノウミ
Modern	志雄路から	羽咋の海
Romanized	Shioji kara	Hakuhi no umi

Classical Chinese and Old Japanese

Japanese and Koreans had long used Chinese characters to write non-Chinese terms and proper names phonetically by selecting characters for Chinese words that sounded similar to each syllable.

Chinese Writing	夜 久 毛 多 都
Middle Chinese Pron.	yae kjuw maw ta tu
Old Japanese Pron.	ya-kumo tatu