On Thu, 23 Jan 2003, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
> > * Lars Marius Garshol
> > | Chinese script Man'yoogana Logosyllabary Syllabary
> >
> > * Peter T. Daniels
> > | Why not the kana generally?
> >
> > I decided to model this as Hanzi -> Man'yoogana -> Kana.
>
> Is that a reasonable description of what happened?

It doesn't say anything, because "kana" is a generic umbrella term.

Manyougana is the stage where Han characters are stripped of their
semantic value, and used as a syllabary with their graphic form unaltered.
(The same practice is still used in writing Chinese, particularly
transliteration.) The phonetic value may be either an early Sino-Japanese
one (making it "on" gana) , or a native Japanese one ("kun" kana); the
latter the result of first assigning a semantically-similar Japanese
word to the Han character used to write the Chinese word (but that is part
of another path of development of Han characters as used in Japanese).

Simplify and modify the graphic forms (using processes similar, but more
extreme than cursive writing or PRC-style Han character simplifications)
and reduce the set by choosing only one possible representation for each
syllable, and you have the contemporary standard hiragana and katakana
(and the alternate forms that failed to become standard become known as
hentaigana).

Setting up an intermediary manyougana stage allows one to separate 1) the
change from Japanese logographic usage (< Chinese logosyllabic) to
Japanese syllabic usage of Han characers from 2) the
alteration/simplification of the graphic form. However, I don't know if
such a distinction is really neccesary.


Thomas Chan
tc31@...