From: Peter T. Daniels
Message: 1182
Date: 2003-01-23
>Seeley (*Hist. Writ. Jpn.*, Brill 1991, repr. Hawaii 2000) seems to say
> 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.