[Multilingual Monday] Hentaigana
So one thing I've found fascinating from collecting old Japanese books, is seeing the orthography of Japanese shift into its modern form gradually from Classical Chinese. A while back I covered the likes of kanbun, which was essentially Classical Chinese with Japanese hints on how to reorder the sentence and pronounce certain words. This was, obviously, far from ideal, but it was used for centuries, because Classical Chinese was the language of the educated. This meant, then, that even though there were other kinds of orthography that developed, textbooks until the 1800s were still written in Classical Chinese.
During the Meiji era orthography changed quite a bit. The rule seemed for a while: if something has Chinese characters, write it in Chinese characters. If none exist, then use katakana for representation. The book featured here, Writings on the Nations of the World, was written about 1870 or so, and, for starters, there is very little katakana. Suddenly, instead, most representations are in HIRAGANA and, while in grass script this was quite common, in print this was NOT, and signaled a shift in the use of written Japanese.
However, which hiragana to use were open to debate, as multiple forms with the same pronunciation had cropped up, and this is due to the fact that hiragana had simply been vastly simplified Chinese characters, and because different characters had the same pronunciation, so too did their simplifications. These are called hentaigana (not to be confused with hentai!), and examples of these can be found at this Wikipedia page, here at the page's Japanese counterpart, and here, a handy reference from an older book.
Of course you need to see it in practice, right? From the aforementioned book of the nations of the world:
A map of north and Central America. Note how countries like Greenland and America are spelled out, for example, and compare to modern グリーンランド and アメリカ. Note that, even though these are foreign names, they're, on this map, written in hiragana and NOT katakana, which is done in modern Japanese.
A map of Europe circa 1870. Of course the countries have changed since then, but it's still obvious for the most part what is supposed to be what here. not inconsistencies with a modern ga in the rendering of Portugal, and isupaniya for "Spain" instead of modern Supein.
Two pages about, among other things, Napoleon. Can you find his name? Again rendered with some hentaigana. Also of interest: why is this page split? Above is a cleaner "print", and along the bottom is different text in grass script. I'm not sure why this is, or why two different scripts were implemented. Anyone? Suggestions?
Another two-page spread, this time talking about Europeans meeting native Americans.. Wow, that pic is so beyond wrong. :: laugh :: Again we have the dual text doing on here, and I have no clue why. And yeah, the grass script is REALLY hard to read.
The use of hentaigana continued even as the Japanese got the printing press, and some of the characters you see here survived for another 30 years until the first of several orthographic reforms. These are still very occaisonally seen on things like soba signs, but many people can not read hentaigana without some sort of help these days. Then again, the same can be said about the grass script seen in the above pages. :: laugh ::
Comments are, of course, welcome!