Hentaigana

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Hentaigana
変体仮名
変体がな
itaigana (異体仮名)[1]
Script type
Time period
c. 800 – 1900 CE; minor use at present
LanguagesJapanese
Related scripts
Parent systems
Oracle Bone Script
Sister systems
Katakana, Hiragana
ISO 15924
ISO 15924Hira, , ​Hiragana
Unicode
Unicode alias
Hiragana
Unicode range
 This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

In the Japanese writing system, hentaigana (変体仮名, 変体がな, Japanese pronunciation: [hentaiɡana] or [hentaꜜiɡana], lit. "variant kana")[a] are variant forms of hiragana.[2]

History[]

現今児童重宝記 : 開化実益 (1886)
Hentaigana are forgotten and distorted little by little. From the left is Meiji period, 1975, 2004, 2017.

Today, with few exceptions, there is only one hiragana for each of the fifty moras that are written without diacritics or digraphs. However, traditionally there were generally several more-or-less interchangeable hiragana for each. A 1900 script reform[b] ordained that only one selected character be used for each mora, with the rest deemed hentaigana. Today, although not normally used in publication, hentaigana are still used in shop signs and brand names to create a traditional or antiquated air.

Hiragana originate in man'yōgana, a system where kanji were used to write sounds without regard to their meaning. There was more than one kanji that could be used equivalently for each syllable (at the time, a syllable was a mora). Over time the man'yōgana was reduced to a cursive form, the hiragana. Many hentaigana derive from different kanji from the ones for the now-standard hiragana, but some are the result of different styles of cursive writing. As hentaigana have derived from man'yōgana, there are hundreds of different hentaigana used to represent only 90 moras of the Japanese language.

Katakana have variant forms, too. For example, It-子.png(ネ) and It-井.png(ヰ).[4] However, katakana's variant forms are fewer than hiragana's ones. 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.[5]

Standardized hentaigana[]

Prior to 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).[6]

a i u e o
あ(安) い(以) う(宇) え(衣) お(於)
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