They are fake "old" syllabaries for Japanese, made in the very nationalistic
kokugaku circles in the 18th century (Hirata Atsutane/Tsurumine Shigenobu/
Ookuni Takamasa/Ochiai Naozumi etc.), many obviously under Korean
influence. They were claimed by their discoverers/makers to go back to the
time of the Gods (="Jindai", =Kaminoyo), so Chinese and Korean writings were
"later" than these Japanese ones...
Hirata Atsutane listed 13 sets, Ochiai Naozumi 12 other ones. Some of the
sets are just badly scrabbled signs as if they were a kind of stylistic
variation of kana, others are Korean-like, or seem pictorial (all are
syllabaries though.)
While no serious current scholar treats them as really having existed, to
what extent Hirata c.s. actually faked them themselves or were duped by
others is an open question, one not taken up often enough it seems to me.
Martin Heijdra
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rick McGowan" <rick@unicode.org>
To: <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2001 1:00 PM
Subject: Re: status of Jindai scripts?
> Thomas Chan wrote...
>
> > I'd like to ask about the encoding status of the Japanese "Jindai"
> > scripts, which are mentioned in older documents[1], and until a certain
> > point in time, versions of the Roadmap.
>
> Do you have a paper on the topic? You say "over a dozen 'Jindai'
> scripts". What does this mean? Is it a style of stylization? A style of
> its own? Something else entirely? A cipher on Chinese characters? Of
> Kana?
>
> I don't know anyone who knows enough about it to even answer basic
> questions. We know it's Japanese, and is probably associated with Shinto.
>
> Do you have more information?
>
> Rick
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 13:48:07 EDT