Re: hentaigana

From: Lars Marius Garshol (larsga@garshol.priv.no)
Date: Tue Apr 09 2002 - 10:08:41 EDT


* Kenneth Whistler
|
| You're still making category errors here.

I'm not surprised. I *am* having problems figuring this out. :)
 
| The distinction to make is between standard kana (which includes
| both hiragana and katakana), as established by the Meiji education
| reform, and abnormal form kana (hentaigana), which are all the other
| kana forms deprecated by the Meiji education reform.

Aha! That pretty much explains it for me.
 
| There are hentai hiragana forms -- those shown on
| http://okayama.cool.ne.jp/monjo/hentaigana.htm
| are all hiragana forms, by the way. And there are also hentai
| katakana forms -- piecewise extractions of kanji characters that
| were used as katakana, but which were also deprecated and not among the
| standard set of katakana used today.

So when most people say "katakana" what they mean is "standard
katakana", since "katakana" (as you use it) refers to a way of
extracting syllabic characters from more complex Kanji characters?
(And ditto for "hiragana", I presume.)

Would it make sense to describe the evolution of these characters in
terms of five scripts: hanzi, man'yoogana, kana, current
hiragana/katakana (each replaced by the following, in order of
derivation)?
 
| Note that even in the standard collection of hiragana encoded
| in Unicode today (and in JIS) there are a couple old kana forms
| (U+3090 WI and U+3091 WE) that were dropped in the post-WWII reforms,
| because they represent sounds that are no longer distinct in modern
| Japanese. (They are pronounced just 'i' and 'e', respectively now.)
| So they have dropped from modern orthography in favor of the
| hiragana for I and E, and could be considered another, later
| instance of hentaigana, even though they are not generally named
| as such.

I see. So these terms are a little fuzzy around the edges, then.
 
| Go back to the online chart that Ben pointed us to, and I'll walk
| you through it.

Thank you! This helped enormously. I feel I more-or-less understand
this now.

Interesting that it seems that the reform did not necessarily choose
the most commonly used form for each syllable.

| This chart doesn't explain the similarly complex history for how
| various representations for katakana syllables developed from kanji
| pieces, and which ones of those got fixed during the Meiji education
| reform. But there are charts of those, as well.

If anyone has links to such charts I'd be glad to see references.

| Many of them are just cursive forms for the Han characters --

This raises a new question: what does "cursive" mean as applied to
Chinese characters? It doesn't seem to be the same as for Latin ones.
 
| So yes, it is a technical issue -- not uncommon for dealing with
| historical forms of writing systems -- and not just a matter of me
| being procedurally correct.

That answers my question. (Thanks!)

-- 
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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