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.

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2012 February 08, 12:27 am)