People seemed to find it interesting when I uploaded some pictures of the manuscript on the 百人一首 thread, so I thought people might like to see some more examples. These are from a manuscript of the first chapter of the Tale of Genji that I'm working with for my dissertation; I'm still a beginner in this so I have a lot of ways to cheat -- there's a full transcription of the manuscript on the Internet and of course the text of the 1st chapter of Genji is available in many places.

First, here's a whole page (this is one of the early pages so I was still writing in every kana and kanji):


Now to highlight some specific things that are either interesting or tricky. First of all, there are kana that look extremely similar:

When you put these next to each other and know that you're looking for differences you can see them, but I messed these up many times at first. A lot of times I only spot these because I already know what the text is supposed to be saying.

き and け are especially dangerous in this regard because even the context and grammar sometimes doesn't help -- うつくしけ (うつくしげ) means "appears beautiful" and うつくしき is just the 連体形 of "beautiful" so often they can both work.

The kanji are especially difficult; thankfully there aren't many kanji and they use the same few over and over again so I've gotten used to them:


The original manuscript had no punctuation or 濁点 (voicing marks) but they've been added in (sporadically) by a later person:

In the first picture you can see that a dakuten has been added to the lower left of す making it やらず (modern やらない) -- the dakuten are sometimes placed to the lower left. The punctuation tend to be solid dots in the middle (as in the right picture, you can see the dot before the か, although in the early pages they use open circles for some reason.

There are also "corrections" or changes to the text called ミセケチ（見せ消ち）, where a later person has marked the text in a way so that you can still read it (thus the name) and written in a different reading they found in a manuscript or commentary.

In the left picture, なり has been changed to 吹 (look for the faint marks to the left of the kana), and on the right picture, はつる has been changed to はへる (you can see a faint mark through the つ)

Finally, people used to write marginal annotations and commentary directly into the manuscripts, so there tends to be a lot of that. Here's one example:

The text says いとあつし (very sick), the commentator has noted that this is 更衣 (the Kiritsubo Intimate, Genji's mother) and that the meaning of あつし is 異例がち (sickly). There are also dakuten added to the つ and I think the し also, but they're two different types. Luckily I don't have to bother with these notes, which is good since they're often very small and hard to read (although if I did, the transcription of this manuscript on the Internet has all the notes transcribed as well).

Anyway, it's kind of fun to work with this even though it can sometimes be frustrating. But at the same time I realize I'm pretty bad at this -- if this weren't something I've already read, and I didn't have a transcription to check, I wouldn't be able to do this.

Cool. Thanks.

cool.

I really don't see how you arrive at け and た from those pictures, but I'll take your word for it.

Oh man I'd get the biggest headache if I had to read that for more than 10 minutes.

nadiatims Wrote:cool.

I really don't see how you arrive at け and た from those pictures, but I'll take your word for it.

The け is a 崩し字 of 遣 and the た comes from 堂. I can spot them now because I've seen them a bunch of times, but without already knowing what the text was supposed to say and having my little かな辞典 to look at, I would have never figured those out. The た always has that little tick on the top and the smudge at the bottom, and the bottom stroke け always looks like the bottom stroke of と rather than the normal き on the left.

Once you know the distinguishing features and get some practice, it's really no harder than telling (say) 待 and 持 apart.

ah that explains it. Interesting that た comes from 堂 close to the modern mandarin pronunciation tang.

So now I'm working with another manuscript that has more kanji, so I'm having to start learning the kanji 崩し字, which is harder. Some of the kanji are easy to identify, but a lot of them are pretty opaque if you don't already know what they are, especially some of the frequently used ones. Here's 6 examples:


Answers:
1. 被注 (because 被 is a kanbun marker for passive and so used relatively often, it sometimes gets changed to a nearly unrecognizable scribble; this is one of the worst examples I've seen. The red レ means to flip the order of the characters so you end up with 注（ちゅう）せらる
2. 也
3. 事
4. 御 (all 3 are examples of this)
5. 聞書　(the 書 may look somewhat familiar to people who know simplified Chinese characters)
6. 爰ニ句ヲヨク可切云々 (once again the red レ means to flip the characters). One thing you have to be careful of with kanbun or kanbun-influenced text is that while 可 can be potential, it most often is read ベシ and means "should" or "must" instead. So this means "This is (definitely) a good place to end the sentence (it is said)" rather than "you can end the sentence here". (EDIT: I'm not confident of this reading since 能 is read as ヨク in kanbun and indicates potential, and I'm not sure I've seen よく in this way to mean "good". I'm still a relative beginner at this.)

とっても複雑だな～

Makes you appreciate how much things have been simplified and standardized.

Thanks for posting this and explaining some of the oddness.

yudantaiteki Wrote:The け is a 崩し字 of 遣 and the た comes from 堂.

Interesting, but how this relates to this: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ファイル:Hiragana_origin.svg ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentaigana

Thank you! Now that I re-read your post I see you were careful to write only "kana". It was only my false assumption that these are hiragana...

Hentai-gana is a kind of hiragana (or katakana); the images in the first post are still hiragana, just not the standard forms used today.

(I'm pretty sure it wasn't until the Meiji period that they really started eliminating hentai-gana, and as far as I know some of them were still used into the 20th century. Of course the term "hentai-gana" is only meaningful once you've codified a standard set.)

This is indeed extremely interesting! Thanks.

I'm sure some day I'll read a book about the origin and development of Chinese characters too.