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
an ancient Japanese syllabary in which kanji represented sounds instead of their normal ideogram meaning. It was used in the Manyoshū, a poetic anthology