Jōdai Tokushu Kanazukai. This usage has led historical linguists to conclude that certain disparate sounds in Old Japanese, consistently represented by differing sets of man'yōgana characters, may have merged since then. Types In writing which utilizes man'yōgana, kanji are mapped to sounds in a number of different ways, some of which are straightforward and others which are less so. Shakuon kana () are based on a Sino-Japanese on'yomi reading, in which one character represents either one mora or two morae. Shakkun kana () are based on a native kun'yomi reading, one to three characters represent one to three morae. Development Due to the major differences between the Japanese language (which was polysyllabic) and the Chinese language (which was monosyllabic) from which kanji came, man'yōgana proved to be very cumbersome to read and write. As stated earlier, since kanji has two different sets of pronunciation, one based on Sino-Japanese pronunciation and the other on native Japanese pronunciation, it was difficult to determine whether a certain character was used to represent its pronunciation or its meaning, i.e., whether it was man'yōgana or actual kanji, or both. On top of that, Buddhist monks found recording oral teachings time-consuming, since every syllable would need to be written using an entire kanji. To alleviate the confusion and to save time writing, kanji that were used as man'yōgana eventually gave rise to hiragana, including the now-obsolete hentaigana () alternatives, alongside a separate system that became katakana. Hiragana developed from man'yōgana written in the highly cursive sōsho () style popularly used by women; meanwhile, katakana was developed by Buddhist monks as a form of shorthand, utilizing, in most cases, only fragments (for example, usually the first or last few strokes) of man'yōgana characters. In some cases, one man'yōgana character for a given syllable gave rise to a hentaigana that was simplified further to result in the current hiragana character, while a different man'yōgana character was the source for the current katakana equivalent. For example, the hiragana (ru) is derived from the man'yōgana , whereas the katakana (ru) is derived from the man'yōgana . The multiple alternative hiragana forms for a single syllable were ultimately standardized in 1900, and the rejected variants are now known as hentaigana. Man'yōgana continues to appear in some regional names of present-day Japan, especially in Kyūshū. A phenomenon similar to man'yōgana, called ateji (), still occurs, where words (including loanwords) are spelled out