* Kenneth Whistler
|
| 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.
This is helpful, but immediately raises a number of new questions.
Earlier you said hentaigana were older forms of hiragana + katakana,
but now it seems they developed at the same time. Or did this
simplification simply lead to a set of characters that was later
divided into hiragana, katakana, and the rest (loosely called
hentaigana)?
Are there different hentaigana with the same sound? Would you describe
the hentaigana as a syllabary, or is it too chaotic for that?
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| - is hentaigana a set of characters?
* Kenneth Whistler
|
| 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.
For 'set' I meant the mathematical meaning. For 'character' the
Unicode definition will do. Does that help?
What I was trying to find out was whether hentaigana were kind of like
hiragana or katakana, or whether there was some fundamental difference.
I've tried some more questions in this direction above.
* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| - are they just a different style of writing some other set of
| characters (say hiragana), or characters in their own right?
* Kenneth Whistler
|
| Again, that begs the question about encoding. It depends on how you
| approach it.
Well, let's put it this way, then: "in your personal opinion, would
hentaigana be unified with the kana already in Unicode"?
| 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.
That's fair enough, but does this mean that it's really difficult to
tell what the right solution would be, because the relationship
between the characters is so close, or are you just being procedurally
correct?
-- 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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