* Ben Monroe
|
| Hentaigana are kana. Hiragana and katakana come from hentaigana and
| are a part of kana.
| [...]
| Hentaigana are the kana used [until around] 1900.
Aha! Then I start to get it. (Thanks. :)
| If you can't display the Japanese on the webpages correctly, try
| running it through http://web.shodouka.com/ which will turn it all
| into pictures for you. Even if you can't read it, you should be able
| to compare the characters in the charts and (hopefully) see the
| resemblence (between the original kanji and the hentaigana [=kana])
| for some of the characters.
I saw this correctly, but since I can't read Japanese I had no idea
what column to look in for the hentaigana or how to tell them apart
from other characters. (It is a picture already, BTW.)
I still don't understand how to read this chart, though. I can see the
graphic similarities, but that doesn't help before I know which
characters are the hentaigana. Is it the ones with turquoise
background?
| Correct, hentai_gana_ are kana. Refer to the pictures on the
| previous or following webpages. (Run through
| http://web.shodouka.com/ if needed) They are the older characters
| used for a little under a thousand years until about 1900 when the
| kanji that is used to write kana was singled to a single
| character. (I believe I went into this in much more detail in the
| previous post.)
You did, but not in a way that a person who doesn't understand
Japanese could hope to understand. It's still pretty confusing, to be
honest.
These characters were used from about 1000 to 1900 as syllabic
characters. Right? In 1900 something happened that took the hentaigana
out of use and replaced them with two syllabaries (katakana + hiragana).
Right? Somewhere here there is a relationship between these
syllabaries and kanji, but I have no idea where.
| My post must not have been very clear at all.
It wasn't. :) I think it's difficult for people who are intimate with
Japanese to understand how opaque this whole thing is for people who
have only a vague understanding of the roles of the different scripts.
| Kana derive from kanji.
Do you mean "hentaigana derive from kanji, and hiragana and katakana
derive from hentaigana"?
| They are not the same as kana though. Hentaigana are a type of old
| kana. Since I can't type hentaigana, I can only describe what they
| are by talking about which kanji characters they come from (or refer
| to charts with pictures).
Well, you don't need to tell me about individual characters (that
would only be confusing, anyway). What I am curious about is the
script as a whole.
| They are syllabic. Each one represents a single, particular
| sound. They do not individually carry a meaning like kanji do. For
| all intensive purposes, you can think of them as hiragana or
| katakana that are not used anymore. They are kana.
This helped a lot. But kana is split into three categories: hiragana,
katakana, and hentaigana, right?
How many hentaigana are there? 46? 92? Did one part become hiragana
and another katakana, or were two different sets of characters created
from a single source set? Or was the process completely different?
Also, how long have hiragana and katakana been in use? I thought they
were very old, but apparently that was wrong.
| I would say that they are different characters in their own right
| that do not correspond to their modern characters except in phonetic
| readings. But that is probably debatable. (and I expect others to
| argue on the other side)
Well, since people are talking about encoding hentaigana in Unicode it
would seem that they are not mere glyph variants of the existing kana,
but separate characters.
| Hope this clears it up a bit more.
Yes, this helped a lot. I know what they are now, so I've moved on to
be curious about the details. :-)
-- Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian <URL: http://www.ontopia.net > ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >
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