Hentaigana

In the Japanese writing system, hentaigana(変体仮名, 変体がな; Japanese pronunciation: [hentaiɡana] or [hentaꜜiɡana], lit. "variant kana") are variant forms of hiragana.

Description

In contrast to modern Japanese, hiragana historically had several distinct forms representing a single sound. For example, while the hiragana reading "ha" has only one form in modern Japanese (は), until the Meiji era (1868–1912) it was written in various forms, including , , and . The shift to using only one character for each sound occurred as part of the 1900 script reform, which also included other changes to the written language to standardize spelling (and was part of a larger project to westernize the country).

As a result of this state-mandated standardization of hiragana, variant kana have fallen into disuse in modern Japan, save for limited situations such as signboards, calligraphy, place names, and personal names. Today, those hiragana glyphs not used in school education since 1900 as a result of the script reform are called hentaigana.

History

Hiragana, the main Japanese syllabic writing system, derived from a cursive form of man'yōgana, a system where Chinese ideograms (kanji) were used to write sounds without regard to their meaning. Originally, the same syllable (more precisely, mora) could be represented by several more-or-less interchangeable kanji, or different cursive styles of the same kanji. However, the 1900 script reform determined that only one specific character be used for each mora, with the rest being called hentaigana ("variant characters").

The 1900 standard included the hiragana ゐ, ゑ, and を, which historically stood for the phonetically distinct moras /wi/, /we/, and /wo/ but are currently pronounced as /i/, /e/, and /o/, identically to い, え, and お. The を kana is still commonly used in the Japanese writing system, instead of お, for the direct object particle /-o/. These characters were deprecated by the 1946 spelling reform.

Hentaigana are still used occasionally today in some contexts, such as store signs and logos, to achieve the "old-fashioned" or "traditional" look.

Katakana also has variant forms, such as (ネ) and (ヰ). However, katakana's variant forms are fewer than hiragana's. Katakana's choices of man'yōgana segments had stabilized early on and established – with few exceptions – an unambiguous phonemic orthography (one symbol per sound) long before the 1900 script regularization.

Standardized hentaigana

Before the proposal which led to the inclusion of hentaigana in Unicode 10.0, they were already standardized into a list by Mojikiban, part of the Japanese Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA).

To view hentaigana, special fonts need to be installed that support Hentaigana such as:

• (Version 5.01 and later)

The glyph for example Hiragana wu (𛄟) also needs a special font to display such as

• Uraniwa Mincho X

Sources

Hentaigana are adapted from the reduced and cursive forms of the following man’yōgana (kanji) characters. Source characters for the kana are not repeated below for hentaigana even when there are alternative glyphs; some are uncertain.

In Unicode

286 hentaigana characters are included in the Unicode Standard in the Kana Supplement and Kana Extended-A blocks. One character was added to Unicode version 6.0 in 2010, 𛀁 (U+1B001 HIRAGANA LETTER ARCHAIC YE which has the formal alias HENTAIGANA LETTER E-1), and the remaining 285 hentaigana characters were added in Unicode version 10.0 in June 2017.

The Unicode block for Kana Supplement is U+1B000–U+1B0FF:

The Unicode block for Kana Extended-A is U+1B100–U+1B12F:

Modern usage

While hentaigana started out as handwritten cursive variants of hiragana, they were used well into the modern era in printed books during the Meiji era, albeit with inconsistency. They occur sporadically in hiragana-heavy text. Some books were typeset with regular hiragana and their hentaigana variants on the same line. Here is a text sample from an 1893 book:

形容動詞と𛂞、もの事の品位、性質、分量等を意味𛁑る詞をいひます。形容動詞に、左の二類ありま𛁏。 ㈠久活………善（よ） く く し き 𛀳れ ㈡志久活……惡（あ）しく しく し しき 𛁈けれ

— Shiratori Kikuji, 雅文俗文作文語格, 形容動詞

In this sample, 𛂞 is a variant of は, 𛁑 and 𛁏 of す, 𛀳 of け, and 𛁈 of し. Another book was typeset with two different spellings for the same phrase tatoe-ba: たとへ𛂞゙ and たとへば. The same word, nashi, can be spelt with regular hiragana (なし) and hentaigana (𛂁し) on the same page.

The choice between different hiragana and hentaigana could be contextual. For example, か, 𛁈 and 𛂦 may be used at the beginning of a word, while 𛀙, 𛁅 and 𛂡 may be used elsewhere, while 𛂞 was used extensively specifically for the topic particle.

Hentaigana are now considered obsolete, but a few marginal uses remain. For example, otemoto (chopsticks), is written in hentaigana on some wrappers and many soba shops use hentaigana to spell kisoba on their signs. (See also: "Ye Olde" for "the old" on English signs.)

Hentaigana are used in some formal handwritten documents, particularly in certificates issued by classical Japanese cultural groups (e.g., martial arts schools, etiquette schools, religious study groups, etc.). Also, they are occasionally used in reproductions of classic Japanese texts, akin to blackletter in English and other Germanic languages to give an archaic flair. Modern poems may be composed and printed in hentaigana for visual effect.

However, most Japanese people cannot read hentaigana nowadays, only recognizing a few from their common use in shop signs, or figuring them out from context.[citation needed]

Gallery

Some of the following hentaigana are cursive forms of the same kanji as their standard hiragana counterparts, but simplified differently. Others descend from unrelated kanji that represent the same sound.

• 以（い）i
• 江（え）e
• 於（お）o
• 可（か）ka, ga
• 起（き）ki, gi
• 古（こ）ko, go
• 志（し）shi, ji
• 春（す）su, zu
• 多（た）ta, da
• 奈（な）na
• 能（の）no
• 者（は）ha, ba
• 由（ゆ）yu
• 連（れ）re
• 路（ろ）ro
• 王（わ）wa

See also

• Furigana
• Romaji

Notes

External links

• from O'Neill's A Reader of Handwritten Japanese 2006-07-07 at the Wayback Machine
• hosted by Jim Breen of the WWWJDIC
• (in Japanese)
• - Unicode