Lars Marius Garshol asked:
> * Lars Marius Garshol
> |
> | Hentaigana? What are they? I tried Google, but couldn't really work
> | it out.
>
> * Ben Monroe
> |
> | Modern hiragana and katakana derive from certain styles of writing
> | Chinese hanzi.
>
> Hiragana and katakana? But I was asking about hentaigana? What are
> they?
Early forms of kana, as both Eleven-Digit Boy and Ben Monroe tried
to point out.
And since Ben already responded in some more detail, I'll now delete
some of my response. :-)
> As far as I can make out you're talking about kana here.
Yes, he is.
Hentaigana < hentai 'transformation, metamorphosis', and
in particular, 'abnormal, perverted' + kana
In other words, "abnormal kana" -- odd old forms of kana that
predated the Meiji period standardization of written forms for
education in 1900.
> This is totally mystifying! This text describes hentaigana (if I
> understand you correctly) as being kana, and then seems to go on to
> say that they are like kanji.
Just to add a little to Ben's explanation, Japanese was
originally written *entirely* in Chinese characters. In
some cases, Chinese vocabulary was borrowed in, and
written exactly as in Chinese. In some cases, the meaning of
a Chinese character was applied to the root of a Japanese
noun, verb, or other content word. And to express the rest
of Japanese, which is full of particles and inflections missing
from Chinese grammar, a number of Chinese characters were
used merely for their sound, rather than their meaning. The
latter instance is referred to as man'yoogana "Chinese characters
used phonetically to write Japanese". Incidentally, the
original meaning of "kana" is "false name" -- the man'yoogana
were false name applications of the Chinese characters to
represent mere sounds, rather than the true meanings of
those characters.
During the Heian Period (8th to 12th centuries), the man'yoogana
were simplified down -- in part by cursive simplifications, which
led to hiragana, and in part by piecewise extractions, which led
to katakana. The reason why there were so many hentaigana that
resulted is that there wasn't just one man'yoogana for each sound --
in some instances there were many used. Also, there wasn't necessary
just a single route for simplication of a particular man'yoogana
form. And the situation has
been complicated somewhat by the fact that Japanese itself has
evolved over the centuries.
The hentaigana survived in use basically up until the Meiji
standardization.
> Maybe some more concrete questions will help:
>
> - is hentaigana a set of characters?
That begs the question of what a "set of characters" is. They
are multiple archaic forms of kana, predating the Meiji (and
later) orthographic reforms.
> - are they just a different style of writing some other set of
> characters (say hiragana), or characters in their own right?
Again, that begs the question about encoding. It depends on
how you approach it.
*Encoded* characters are the result of encoding *decisions*. They
do not spring full-formed from the brow of Zeus.
>
> - apparently they are in use today.
No. Well, I guess Ben has cited some marginal current usage.
> why? for what?
The only usage they would have would be in the facsimile reproduction
of classic texts which used them.
> could they be
> replaced by other characters?
In fact they have been. The Meiji orthography reforms eliminated
their use -- and all Japanese classics are *published* using modern
kana. As Ben pointed out, if they were published using hentaigana
from original manuscripts or early wood-block printed versions,
modern readers wouldn't be able to read them. It is bad enough
trying to get through the old Japanese vocabulary and grammar
(akin to an English-speaker trying to read Chaucer), without also
having to use unfamiliar old letter-forms.
The reasons why hentaigana have not been encoded in Unicode are:
1. They were not included in any Japanese character encoding
standard, national or vendor.
2. No one has brought an official proposal to the UTC or WG2 to
add hentaigana to Unicode/10646.
The reason for 1 is pretty clear -- hentaigana are of no use in
modern Japanese IT, and so neither JSC nor the various vendors
who extended JIS bothered with them.
The reason for 2 follows from 1, but also from the fact that since
hentaigana are such a mess of competing old forms, nobody has really
figured out what would be a comprehensive proposal to bring in for
encoding, anyway.
The reason why TRON includes hentaigana is, I presume, mostly
political. It enables them to point to something for Japanese that
they include but which Unicode does not -- regardless of any real
use. I rather doubt there is much use of hentaigana in TRON to
do any significant work on old Japanese manuscript material.
As to whether hentaigana should be added to Unicode, and if so,
how many and in what relation to the existing kana -- I consider
that an open issue until someone actually goes to the effort
to make a proposal in sufficient detail to enable a technical
discussion to start.
--Ken
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Mon Apr 08 2002 - 14:23:12 EDT