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Grammar detail: 万葉仮名(まんようがな)

万葉仮名(まんようがな)
117 words
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まんようがな
万葉仮名
, literally 'ten thousand leaves kana', is the earliest form of kana used in Japanese.
When Chinese characters were first imported by monks and scholars to write the Japanese language, characters with similar sounds in Chinese were used to represent the sounds of Japanese, but with no respect to the actual meanings of the characters. Japanese words, most with multiple syllables, were written with multiple Chinese characters, and many different characters were used to represent the same sound with no standardization.
Over time, the characters used were standardized to a smaller set, and over even more time, elements of the original Chinese characters were extracted for ease of writing, and these became modern day hiragana and katakana.
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Kanji used in this grammar

マン   バン    10,000   
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ヨウ   leaf   は leaves   
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カ   ケ   かり temporary, provisional, tentative   
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メイ   ミョウ   な name   
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