* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| Hentaigana? What are they? I tried Google, but couldn't really work
| it out.
* Ben Monroe
|
| Modern hiragana and katakana derive from certain styles of writing
| Chinese hanzi.
Hiragana and katakana? But I was asking about hentaigana? What are
they?
| http://okayama.cool.ne.jp/monjo/hentaigana.htm has a chart of some
| of these characters and show which hanzi they come from. It's not a
| very complete chart, though, but should suffice to get the point
| across.
Since I can't read Japanese, not even to work out whether this chart
shows the origins of hiragana+katakana or of hentaigana I'm afraid
this didn't help me a lot.
| For example, U+3042 (あ) comes from U+5B89 (安) in modern
| Japanese. But, [...]
As far as I can make out you're talking about kana here.
| http://homepage2.nifty.com/Gat_Tin/kanji/kana.htm shows some
| pictures of hentaigana used in modern Japan. The paragraph at the
| beginning roughly reads: "Kana that have not been encoded into
| modern, public character sets. They were used in elementary text
| books until MORI Arinori of the Ministry of Education started the
| "system of screening school textbooks" in Meiji 19 [1886]. There was
| a problem in distinguishing them from cursive kanji, but differed
| from kanji in that dakuten and handakuten [voicing marks; like " and
| a circle] could be used. (etc)"
This is totally mystifying! This text describes hentaigana (if I
understand you correctly) as being kana, and then seems to go on to
say that they are like kanji.
Maybe some more concrete questions will help:
- is hentaigana a set of characters?
- are they syllabic or logosyllabic characters?
- is it a clearly closed set? (like hiragana)
- are they just a different style of writing some other set of
characters (say hiragana), or characters in their own right?
- apparently they are in use today. why? for what? could they be
replaced by other characters?
Thank you for trying to help, but I'm afraid you're assuming I know
far more about Japanese than I actually do.
-- 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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