translating things, building chill software for my friends, playing ttrpgs, making procedural vector art, learning piano, writing unhinged Utena fanfics, and just vibing



mojilove
@mojilove

in lieu of the section that is in lieu of an introduction

Here's the post i made ages ago about a cool tool called soan that lets you make images with pseudo old printed joined up writing based on text data. This post here is a follow-up to that one: https://cohost.org/mojilove/post/2395718-ever-wanted-a-tool-t

to explain the subtitle above, some japanese academic books start off with a section titled 序に代えて (in lieu of an introduction) and finish with a section titled 結びに代えて (in lieu of a conclusion) because what they have written there is assumedly not good enough for their platonic ideal of an introduction and conclusion or whatever.

so on that note, i'm sorry but if i try to give a background to the history of printing in japan i don't think I will ever get this post done.
okay then, here we go!


fun facts about joined-up handwriting in premodern Japanese

premodern handwritten texts in Japanese are generally joined up, and this includes woodblock printed books as well. there were several attempts to recreate this in moveable type, and one attempt resulted in the rare Saga-bon that the soan tool uses as a source for image generation.
anyway, this sort of cursive writing is called kuzushiji and unlike what a certain tofugu article might say in jest, it does not at all resemble "what my handwriting would look like if I lost all motor control." there are rules (i'd hazard a guess that woodblock printed books may have contributed to a generally accepted standard for kuzushiji but i don't know much at all about pre-Meiji (pre-1868) printing). You can't just scribble a character any which way and expect someone else to be able to read it—you need to write it in a specific cursive way.

And wow there are a lot of intricate rules! There is a type of book called oraimono (往来物) which shows sample letters as a guide for people to write their own correspondence. Some feature more handy info on writing as part of letter etiquette. A friend of mine has written a paper in English about how the honorifics sama (様) and dono (殿) are written in different degrees of cursivization depending on exactly how much honour you want to give to the recipient! (the paper is titled Visual Politeness: Remarks on Cursivization as Found in Pre-modern Japanese Handbooks on Letter Writing by Gordian Schreiber, but it hasn't been published yet). Anyway, here are a couple of other rules about joined-up writing that you can find in books like these:

don't join characters across word boundaries

I'm not gonna get into the thorny question of what exactly a "word" means, but you generally don't join characters across chunks of meaning. soan slipped up in my earlier post by joining the ni of sasuga ni with the ka of kanpeki. that is a no-no. You'd want to link sa-su-ga-ni as one chunk, and then ka-n-pe-ki as another chunk. idk if soan uses a morpheme analyser (there is an open source one called MeCab and I had a summer intensive lecture with one of the people who worked on it—it was a lot of fun!!), but maybe it will in the future, as it is apparently still being updated.

do not dip your brush in your ink in the middle of a word

this isn't exactly relevant to moveable type or woodblock type really, but it's still interesting. you should plan your writing so that you don't run out of ink while you're in the middle of writing a word! as a result, in purely hand-written texts, the darkness/thickness of the strokes also help indicate word boundaries. it's not a rigid rule necessarily, but i'd agree that following it would make the text look nicer.

variation in hentaigana

see pages 9 and 10 (out of 29 in the pdf. the pdf is basically three documents stapled together, making it a bit hard to cite) of this pdf: https://unicode.org/L2/L2015/15239-hentaigana.pdf
almost everything that I wanted to say about variation in hentaigana is right there. I can repeat it here for ease of access I guess.

  1. some words are habitually written using specific types of kana, such as けふ (kyo, "today" - sorry, i'm not gonna get into the topic of premodern japanese "spelling" (kanazukai) here, but just take my word for it that in premodern texts, the kana for 今日 is written as けふ and read as kyo) which uses a hentaigana derived from 介 instead of our standard け
  2. some hentaigana are typically used at either the start, or elsewhere in a word. for example, one hentaigana for shi deriving from 志 is used at the start of words, and the regular し is used elsewhere.
    To add to this, there are also some hentaigana that are commonly used at the end of lines. these include the regular し (which can be wrapped around the preceding character, letting it fit inside a smaller space - see henohenomoheji for an example of how し can be wrapped around like this), as well as a long and thin hentaigana for ni derived from 耳 which can be stretched out to fill up the rest of the line. iirc Shinji Konno wrote something about this, or at least the concept of the line as a unit of writing.
  3. if the same syllable appears adjacently in two lines, use different hentaigana for each. soan slipped up here, as it had the same い adjacent in two lines. ideally, you'd use a different variation of i for one of the two lines.
  4. dakuon and sokuon can be expressed with different hentaigana. premodern japanese doesn't always use dakuon markings (゛) or small tsu (っ) to represent "doubled consonants," so sometimes these differences were expressed by using different types of hentaigana

You must log in to comment.