Before modern Japanese writing, writers used Chinese characters purely for their phonetic sounds

Science · Published 20 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Long before the graceful curves of hiragana or the angular precision of katakana, Japanese writers faced a linguistic puzzle: how to record their native tongue using a foreign script. The solution was man'yōgana, an ingenious system that stripped Chinese characters of their meaning to capture the sounds of Old Japanese.

Emerging in the 8th century, man'yōgana functioned as a phonetic syllabary. Instead of relying on the semantic concepts traditionally attached to Chinese characters, writers selected them based solely on their Chinese pronunciations to represent Japanese syllables. This shift allowed for the transcription of a language that was fundamentally different from the one the characters were designed to serve. By the end of the 8th century, nearly 1,000 characters were in circulation to map the 90 morae of the Japanese language.

The system was notoriously cumbersome. Because Chinese characters could be used for their original meaning or their phonetic value, reading a text often required navigating ambiguity. To streamline the process, two distinct paths of simplification emerged. Hiragana evolved from cursive, flowing calligraphy—often associated with the ladies of the imperial court in Heian—while katakana developed as a form of shorthand, utilizing fragments of the original characters. These systems eventually replaced the complex man'yōgana for most daily tasks.

Today, the legacy of this phonetic adaptation persists in modern Japanese. While hiragana and katakana handle grammatical functions and loanwords, the spirit of man'yōgana survives in ateji, where kanji are still chosen for their sound rather than their meaning. Furthermore, historical linguists study the specific man'yōgana choices in ancient texts to reconstruct the sounds of Old Japanese, revealing how disparate phonemes may have merged over the centuries. This ancient experiment in writing remains a cornerstone of the Japanese language's evolution.

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