mojilove

dictionary jockey

JA→EN translator. Overeducated and unlearned. Writing systems / shmups / nanoloop / lumines / puns / nonsense / memories / banality

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日英翻訳者 / ユダヤ人 / 文学バカせ / 文字マニア / 小並感の塊 / 人間(堕落者)

身体の104%が文字と文字愛でできおり、残りの29%は肉体。STG・PZLとFM音源も好き。

日本語垢: @mojilove-j


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i hope this will go through—it's nice to have more of these premodern forms available in unicode (wish i had them back in uni when I was transcribing premodern documents). these aren't just limited to handwritten documents either (or woodblock printed documents, in which case the "block copy" is handwritten too)—they continued to be used in the age of moveable type too.

(hmm, i wonder when they went out of fashion... based on my research in hentaigana, i'd imagine that some printers would continue using them for longer than others, so you'd see variation in use depending on the printer rather than the author or publisher, but there must be a cutoff point where hardly anybody uses the ligatures in print for regular texts (i.e., excluding poetry, letter-writing guides, and fancy book introductions written by important people))

(edit: ja wikipedia says they were taken out of official use in 1900, the same year when the government issued a policy that took away all hentaigana from primary school education. perhaps, just like hentaigana, the ligatures may have fallen out of fashion before 1900 and the government was following general practice, but i get the feeling that certain ligatures like yori might have stuck around a little bit longer. maybe someone else has already researched it, but i wish i had the time and resources to either find an existing study or make a survey of my own.)

wikipedia has an english article about them: "Hardly any kana ligatures or polysyllabic kana are represented in standard character encodings." ...well, we'll see about that!


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in reply to @mojilove's post:

oh that's really cool!! i did a tiny bit of translation and interpreting related to the addition of hentaigana—it was a great experience.

following up on the rest of this thread, i'm delighted to know that there are two mongolian square scripts and would eagerly welcome a third if one should be discovered or invented hahaha

I'd also love to see posts on interesting writing systems if you are willing to do them!!

i was only there for the first working group meeting (desperately doing impromptu E to J interpretation for the members of the japan side who were joining as experts/advisors and who could not keep up with the proceedings), and i don't really want to dox myself, but one thing i clearly remember was an issue where one hentaigana based on the kanji 夜 could be used to represent either ya or yo. the japan side wanted to include the same hentaigana shape in two codepoints to facilitate encoding how it should be read, but the unicode side was not happy with including the exact same glyph twice (don't ask me how many times the letter "a" appears in unicode for mathematical symbols, different scripts and so on though hahaha). not sure how it turned out in the end, because there were further meetings after that and i didn't participate at all in those

someone from the unicode side offered to have an informal meeting to help resolve this or another issue but the japan side adamantly refused that offer—i don't know exactly why but I imagine they didn't want the unicode side to try to nudge things too far away from how the japan side wanted them... it was kind of exciting in its own way to see this very political conflict in a generally mundane meeting

i also met someone there who offered to publish my thesis in english if i ever translated it... i never took them up on that offer (gonna take a lot of effort to translate my thesis and idk if it will even be useful to an en-speaking audience) but maybe one day...

i remember looking up hentaigana on the school library computer and gazing at the very beautiful symmetry of one of the forms for no. i have no idea how i came across hentaigana back then though!

ah i love old writing