manyogana
English
Etymology
From Japanese romanization man'yōgana of 万葉仮名.
Noun
manyogana (uncountable)
- An ancient/early Japanese syllabary in which Chinese characters represented sounds instead of their regular meaning as they again do today in the form of kanji; it was the predecessor of hiragana and katakana, present Japanese phonetic alphabets; used in the Manyoshū, a poetic anthology.