kanan.

1727 J. G. Scheuchzer tr. E. Kæmpfer Hist. Japan I. i. iv. 68 The Names of the Provinces..are only in their Canna, or common Writing.

1727 J. G. Scheuchzer tr. E. Kæmpfer Hist. Japan I. iv. iv. 305 Publish'd in the vulgar characters, call'd Kanno.

1874 Trans. Asiatic Soc. Japan I. 104 The invention of the Japanese syllabic kana ten centuries ago.

1879 Trans. Asiatic Soc. Japan VII. 101 It is supposed that he is responsible for the kana readings given by the side of the Chinese text.

1879 Trans. Asiatic Soc. Japan VII. 230 The kana in the Kozhiki and Nihongi are the earliest examples of the use of Chinese characters by the Japanese as phonetic symbols.

1931 H. O. Yardley Amer. Black Chamber 194 Every time I..saw this benevolent-faced whiskered old missionary as he puzzled over Japanese words, kana and code groups.

1965 W. Swaan Japanese Lantern vi. 74 Each of the symbols, known as kana, represented either a vowel or a syllable.

1968 Encycl. Brit. XII. 882 These syllabaries or kana, originally consisting of about 50 syllables, greatly stimulated the development of literature.

1973 Physics Bull. May 279/2 Japanese is normally written, typed or printed in a mixture of Chinese and Japanese Kana characters. The simplest set of these, the ‘education set’, already contains 881 Chinese characters and the ‘daily use’ and ‘standard’ sets contain 1850 and 2669 characters respectively. The dictionary set amounts to between 10 000 and 15 000 characters.