Thomas Chan wrote:

>
> 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.

Seeley (*Hist. Writ. Jpn.*, Brill 1991, repr. Hawaii 2000) seems to say
that it never happened -- as soon as characters started being used for
their sound only, they started getting new (simpler) shapes; and he
makes it very clear that katakana and hiragana had totally separate
spheres of use from before the very beginning (that is, the two systems
developed out of two completely different occasions for
phoneticization).
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...