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Today, among the hiragana glyphs, those not used in school education since 1900 are called hentaigana.
Originally, hiragana had several forms for a single sound. For example, nowadays, the hiragana reading "ha" has only one form, "は". However, until the Meiji era (1868–1912), it was written in various forms, including the following: , and . As a result of the artificial and authoritarian selection of hiragana glyphs, in a wish to standardise the language in efforts of Meiji administration to westernise the country, variant kana is not used much in Japan today, but it is still used in limited situations such as signboards, calligraphy, place names, and personal names.[3]
History
Hentai iroha 47-ji (1886): an iroha kana syllabary written entirely in hentaiganaComparison of the glyphs of hentaigana. From the left is the Meiji period, 1975, 2004 and 2017.
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[4][5] 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.[6]
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).[7] 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.[8]
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).[9]
Hentaigana are adapted from the reduced and cursive forms of the following man’yōgana (kanji) characters.[12] Source characters for the kana are not repeated below for hentaigana even when there are alternative glyphs; some are uncertain.
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.[13]
The Unicode block for Kana Supplement is U+1B000–U+1B0FF:
A soba restaurant: the sign reads "生𛁛𛂦゙ 𛂁𛀙゙𛄍" namasoba nagawi. Written right-to-left, namasoba (生𛁛𛂦゙, equating to 生そば, "raw soba"), consists of the kanji 生nama followed by hentaigana derived from the kanji 楚so and 者 (with dakuten) ba. The black vertical text nagawi (𛂁𛀙゙𛄍, equating to ながゐ, the historical kana spelling of nagaiながい, "long visit"), consists of hentaigana derived from 奈na, 可 (with dakuten) ga and 井wi.
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:
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.[15] The same word, nashi, can be spelt with regular hiragana (なし) and hentaigana (𛂁し) on the same page.[16]
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[b] was used extensively specifically for the topic particle.[17]
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.[18]
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.
^Shiratori, Kikuji (23 December 1893). "形容動詞". 雅文俗文作文語格 (in Japanese). Eisai Shinshi Sha. p. 18.
^Shiratori, Kikuji; Ochiai, Naobumi (15 April 1898). 中等敎育新撰日本文典 (in Japanese). Eisai Shinshi Sha. pp. 34–35.
^Ochiai, Naobumi (26 March 1895). 日本大文典 (in Japanese). Vol. 2. Hakubunkan. p. 185.
^Takada, Tomokazu; Tsutomu, Tsutomu; Saitō, Tatsuya (2015). "変体仮名のこれまでとこれから 情報交換のための標準化" [The past, present, and future of hentaigana: Standardization for information processing]. 情報管理 [Journal of Information Processing and Management] (in Japanese). 58 (6). Japan Science and Technology Agency: 440. doi:10.1241/johokanri.58.438.
