So I just started watching ヱヴァンゲリヲン新劇場版: 序 a.k.a. Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone, and within the first ten minutes I have noticed two instances where the kanji 江 stood for the particle へ (シンジくん江 on a photo and ようこそNERV江 on a file). Is this an acceptable use of this kanji in real life, or is it just an in-universe neologism? When I saw it on the photo I thought it was ギャル文字 or something, but then it appeared on an official-looking document, so I got curious.

I've never seen it before, but remember 江 can be pronounced え as in 江戸, which is how へ as a particle is actually pronounced.

Yeah, I remember. That's how I figured out what they meant by 江 in the first place ("Shinji-kun creek? What the... Oh, え!"). Still, none of the online dictionaries I checked say anything about this usage. Anybody know a good Japanese slang dictionary?

江 is a manyogana for E/YE

Jarvik7 Wrote:江 is a manyogana for E/YE

And to save some people the work of looking up what manyogana is (and simultaneously put the two classes on classical Japanese I took to good use) let me give a brief explanation.

Manyogana is called that because of the Manyoshu, a collection of poems that are all written using the fun method of combining kanji that have meaning and kanji that are simply used for their phonetic sound in a convoluted mess that's virtually impossible to read without years and years of study. In their defense, monks hadn't created an alternate script yet.

Why it's used in Evangelion is beyond me...

But if they were using actual man'yogana, wouldn't 部 (man'yogana for へ) make more sense?

vonPeterhof Wrote:But if they were using actual man'yogana, wouldn't 部 (man'yogana for へ) make more sense?

I don't think you read my description of manyogana...

There's no real rhyme or reason to which character is used when it is being used for phonetics.

vonPeterhof Wrote:But if they were using actual man'yogana, wouldn't 部 (man'yogana for へ) make more sense?

[EDIT: Actually it may have been better for them to use one of the へ kana rather than the え, if that's all you were saying.]

There are multiple man'yogana for most syllables, up to 26 for し. There are also man'yogana that stand for two syllables (i.e. 点 = temu or 金 = kömu).

As Ryuujin27 indicates, the writing system for the Man'yoshu is a total mess. The simplest part is the prose sections, which are written entirely in classical Chinese. But the poems are written in a combination of semantic classical Chinese (intended to be read as Japanese in kanbun style) and characters used purely for phonetic value.

And it's not like the division is predictable -- you can't make any rules like "verb endings are always written phonetically". Some books have a lot of phonetic poems (i.e. book 15) whereas other books are almost entirely semantic (book 10). Many poems still have disputed readings, and a few poems are uninterpretable. Even by the Heian period very few people could read it (even mistakenly), and the MY poems that people did know in that time tended to be ones that had been reproduced in later anthologies written in a more standard style (i.e. the Kokin Waka Rokujo or the few poems in the various imperial anthologies).

(In addition, there are what Alexander Vovin calls "rebus writing", where the characters are not really used for sound or meaning but in some sort of association, i.e. 寒 standing for puyu(冬), or 八十一 for the "kuku" verb stem (kukuru), because 81 is 9 x 9 -> 九九 -> くく. Luckily this rebus writing is rare.)

I do realize that, thank you very much. It doesn't have to be 部, it probably could just as well be 平,弊,辺 or 重 (or 閉,倍, and 経, if a different e-sound was used back then). The point is that they all correspond to the kana へ, rather than え. I am assuming that back when actual man'yogana was used the particle へ was not pronounced え, so it would not have been written with characters that correspond to that sound (江 or 衣). Writing the へ particle as 江 in modern-day (or, in the case of Eva, near future) Japanese is more like ateji than man'yogana.

Edit: Ninja'd, that was in response to Ryuujin.

Edit2: I apologize if my post comes across as rude. I have had my intelligence and competence questioned by people who barely know me ever since I got up this morning, so I was kinda touchy by the time I read your post.

vonPeterhof Wrote:I am assuming that back when actual man'yogana was used the particle へ was not pronounced え

Right, it was pronounced "pe" (I don't know if it's kou or otsu "e"; 部 is kou)

I asked the same question on Lang-8, and I got these responses:

"現実にはほとんど許容されない漢字だと思います。　
今では友達同士であれ、公式であれその字を使うことはほとんどありません。

　またフクション [フィクション] 造語でも無いかと思います。
昔の日本の明治時代の初期くらいまで使われていた使い方です。
今ではごくたまにご年配の方への贈り物に使われる以外は使われません。

とても古めかしい使い方と考えればいいでしょう。"

"贈り物や記念品にはよくこの「江」が使われますよ。"

So it is essentially an archaic way of writing the particle へ that is still sometimes used for things like presents and souvenirs. Makes sense, although I still find it odd that I couldn't find anything about this usage of the kanji in online dictionaries.