At the date of the compilation of the Anthology--the middle of the eighth century--neither of the existing Japanese syllabaries had been invented. Their creation is ascribed to the learned priest _Kûkai_ (_Kôbô Daishi_), the Doctor Promulgator of the Law of Buddha, who died in 834, nearly a hundred years later than the date of the final _tanka_ of the Manyôshiu. The Chinese character had therefore, perforce, to be employed in writing down the lays collected in the manner set forth in the volume of translations. The ideographs were used in part phonetically, in part lexicographically, as they had already been used in writing the Kojiki and the poems cited in that history, and in the almost contemporaneous but very different Nihongi. The ideographs used phonetically were not, however, always employed in the same way. The forty-seven sounds of the syllabary-- _a_ _i_ _u_ _e (ye)_ _o_ _ka_ _ki_ _ku_ _ke_ _ko_ _sa_ _shi_ _su_ _se_ _so_ _ta_ _chi_ _tsu_ _te_ _to_ _na_ _ni_ _nu_ _ne_ _no_ _ha_ _hi_ _f(h.w.)u_ _he_ _ho_ _ma_ _mi_ _mu_ _me_ _mo_ _ya_ _yu_ _yo_ _ra_ _ri_ _ru_ _re_ _ro_ _wa_ _wi_ _we_ _wo_ --were already recognized, and were represented by a sort of alphabet composed of several hundreds of Chinese ideographs, each pronounced exactly or approximately _sinice_--that is _japonico-sinice_, or according to _on_ or Chinese sound. Thus a was represented by two ideographs, 阿 (_a_ in Chinese) and 安 (_an_ in Chinese), _shi_ by twenty-five characters, such as 志 (_chih_ in Chinese), 思 (_ssu_ in Chinese), &c. The other sounds were represented by varying numbers of characters. According to this system, _ame_ (heaven or rain) would or might be written 安米, _tsuchi_ (soil) 都知 and so forth. A complete list of these Chinese phonetic ideographs is given in the _Sôron_ (Introductory) volume of the Kogi. A second method of using the ideographs was to employ them according to their _kun_ (reading i.e. in pure Japanese), thus _utate_ (extremely) was represented by 得田手, _chihahi_ (for _sachihafi_, bless) by 千羽日. Sometimes two characters represented one sound, thus 嗚呼 for _a_, 五十 (_isozhi_) for _i_, 牛鳴, _ushi no naku_, ‘moo’ of cow, for _mu_. Some sounds (_ku_, _ri_, _ru_, _ro_, _wa_) are not found thus symbolized, that is, _japonicé_. A curious double character is 石花 for _se_, another is 羊{蹄} (_hitsuzhi no ashi_) for _shi_. A third and very confused script is exemplified in 還金 _kaherikomu_ (return), where _kaheri_ is _kun_ and _komu_ (kon) is _on_, and 知三 _shirasamu_ (shall know), where _shira_ is _kun_ modified grammatically, and _samu_ (_san_ = three) is _on_ representing the inflexion.