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Several observations may be made about the state of the written language using this Man'yōshū example. First, the characters 世武登 in the second line are the man'yōgana characters representing the syllables /semuto/. Each kanji character in this group, from left to right, represents the sounds /se/, /mu/, and /to/ respectively. As mentioned before, the meanings of these characters are not relevant here; only their sounds are. The remainder of the that line, 船乗, is a Chinese compound meaning "traveling by boat, voyage" and is read in Japanese as funanori. This word in the poem is not written in man'yōgana; it is rather a Japanese word having the same meaning as the Chinese. That is, the Chinese word 船乗 was assigned the pronunciation funanori, which meant 'sea voyage'. Similarly tsuki 月 and shiho 潮 (shio in Modern Japanese) are not written in man'yōgana. Again, 月 and 潮 are Chinese words representing their meaning equivalents in Japanese vocabulary tsuki and shiho. As one can see, this poem contains a mixture of both Japanese and Chinese elements. Overall, Man'yōshū poems contain man'yōgana as well as many lexical and grammatical elements of Chinese.
The general idea of using Chinese to write Japanese was consistent among practitioners of this writing system, but the ways they chose characters to represent Japanese sounds were not. Each practitioner was relatively free to choose any Chinese character which had a similar pronunciation to the Japanese sound. Thus the set of Chinese characters for sound-character substitution quickly became very large; as many as 1,000 characters were known to have been used by the 10th century just to represent about a hundred distinctive syllables (moras) then existing in Japanese. In time, for instance, the sound /si/ could be written with any one of 38 characters including 斯, 志, 之, 師, 紫, 新, 四, 子, 思, 司, 資, and 芝.
During the Heian period (794-1192), using kanji for writing - in Chinese or in man'yōgana - continued. It was in the tenth and eleventh centuries when two other writing systems (based on syllabary principles) developed. These systems are called katakana and hiragana. Recall that the Japanese language has only a small number of distinctive sound units called mora (analogous to syllables); thus to write this language, it was only necessary to devise a system in which each distinct syllable could be assigned to a symbol.
Katakana refers to a system of shorthand symbols which were used mainly by monks, scholars, and government officials to make a pronunciation indication for an unfamiliar Chinese character when reading Chinese. If an unknown character appeared in a text, the reader would note its pronunciation with a kanji or a shorthand abbreviation of it - such as those used in man'yōgana - whose pronunciation the reader knew. For instance, to note the pronunciation of the Chinese character 歟, which would have been pronounced /ka/ in Japanese, the scholar might have written next to it 加 , a man'yōgana for the sound /ka/, or its abbreviation (i.e. the left side of the character) カ. The people who employed this system, who by the way were mostly men, each had a slightly different system of annotation, thus making it difficult, if not impossible, to read someone else's annotation. (Because it was men who were reading these documents, katakana is called "man's hand".) It was not until the mid-Heian period that katakana conventions began to be standardized.
Hiragana developed directly from man'yōgana. It was a cursive version of man'yōgana. It was mentioned earlier that the sound /si/ could have been written using any one of 38 characters. Thus cursive and sometimes very abbreviated versions of these characters began to be used by writers to represent /si/. Hiragana was called "woman's hand" since it was developed and used mainly by women courtiers and writers. Hiragana developed around the same time as katakana.
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