Cursive handwriting gradually gave rise to the hiragana (平仮名, "flat/simple borrowed labels") and Buddhist shorthand practices of using pieces of kanji to denote the sounds then developed into the katakana (片仮名, "partial/piece borrowed labels").

Man'yō, hira, kata It is worth noting that the man'yōgana in each cell only indicates one of many contemporary options for spelling each Japanese mora – in the table above, each chosen character is the direct origin of the corresponding modern hiragana.

See also Hentaigana for a fuller description of how multiple hiragana could be used to spell a single sound.

[2] Although man'yōgana specify different kanji to represent voiced phonemes versus unvoiced phonemes, it is not until the Meiji period that we see standardized usage of the dakuten diacritic ゛ to explicitly mark voicing for hiragana and katakana.

Japan officially adopted simplified shinjitai (新字体, "new character forms") in 1946 as part of a round of orthographic reforms intended to improve literacy rates.

To avoid unnecessary ambiguity, quotes from classical texts would be written in kyūjitai.

Details on these spelling rules are helpful for understanding historical kana usage.

The most prominent difference was the loss of certain spelling distinctions found in the Jōdai Tokushu Kanazukai ("Ancient Special Kana Usage"), which distinguished two types of /i/, /e/, and /o/.

[5][6][7] An increase in Chinese loanwords had a number of phonological effects: The development of the uvular nasal and geminated consonants occurred late in the Heian period and brought about the introduction of closed syllables (CVC).

A paragraph of Early Middle Japanese can be divided into the following units from large to small.

The dative/locative particle -ni was homophonous with the simple infinitive form of the copula -ni, with verbal suffixes supplies more complex case markers -ni-te ('at' a place) and -ni si-te or -ni-te ('by means of').

A number of particle + verb + -te sequences provided other case functions: -ni yori-te 'due to' (from yor- 'depend'), -ni tuki-te 'about, concerning' (from tuk- 'be attached'), and -to si-te 'as' (from se- 'do').

There were some special particles that limited the inflectional form of the yougen or auxiliary verb at the end of a sentence.

According to Susumu Ōno's assumption, if we want to emphasize the noun in question(i.e.「雨」), we can invert the whole sentence as the following:雨か降り来るObviously, this gives birth to the binding rule.

Early Middle Japanese Verbs were divided into 5 class of regular conjugations: Quadrigrade (四段, yodan), Upper monograde (上一段, kami ichidan), Lower monograde (下一段, shimo ichidan), Upper bigrade (上二段, kami nidan), Lower bigrade (下二段, shimo nidan).

There were also 4 "irregular" (変格) conjugations: K-irregular (カ変, kahen), S-irregular (サ変, sahen), N-irregular (ナ変, nahen), R-irregular (ラ変, rahen).

Alternatively, the form above may have been an instance of poetic contraction to limit the number of morae on the line to the expected seven.

Generally, to learn how to use an Auxiliary verb, we need to know (1)its inflection, (2)required forms of its preceding word, and (3) various function.

The nari form was a contraction of the adverbial particle「に」and the -r irregular verb「有り」"be, exist": に + あり → なり, while the tari inflection was a contraction of the adverbial particle と and 有り: と + あり → たり.