Hentaigana

In the Japanese writing system, hentaigana (変体仮名, 変体がな) are variant forms of hiragana.

Description
Today, among the hiragana glyphs, those not used in school education since 1900 are called "hentaigana".

Originally, hiragana had several forms for a single sound. For example, nowadays, the hiragana reading "ha" has only one form, "は". However, until the Meiji era (1868–1912), it was written in various forms, including the following:, and. As a result of the artificial and authoritarian selection of hiragana glyphs, variant kana is not used much in Japan today, but it is still used in limited situations such as signboards, calligraphy, place names, and personal names.

History


Hiragana, the main Japanese syllabic writing system, derived from a cursive form of man'yōgana, a system where Chinese ideograms (kanji) were used to write sounds without regard to their meaning. Originally, the same syllable (more precisely, mora) could be represented by several more-or-less interchangeable kanji, or different cursive styles of the same kanji. However, the 1900 script reform determined that only one specific character be used for each mora, with the rest being called hentaigana ("variant characters").

The 1900 standard included the hiragana ゐ, ゑ, and を, which historically stood for the phonetically distinct moras /wi/, /we/, and /wo/ but are currently pronounced as /i/, /e/, and /o/, identically to い, え, and お. The を kana is still commonly used in the Japanese writing system, instead of お, for the direct object particle /-o/. These characters were deprecated by the 1946 spelling reform.

Hentaigana are still used occasionally today in some contexts, such as store signs and logos, to achieve the "old-fashioned" or "traditional" look.

Katakana also has variant forms, such as (ネ) and (ヰ). However, katakana's variant forms are fewer than hiragana's. Katakana's choices of man'yōgana segments had stabilized early on and established – with few exceptions – an unambiguous phonemic orthography (one symbol per sound) long before the 1900 script regularization.

Standardized hentaigana
Before the proposal which led to the inclusion of hentaigana in Unicode 10.0, they were already standardized into a list by Mojikiban, part of the Japanese Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA). To view hentaigana, special fonts need to be installed that support Hentaigana such as

The glyph for example Hiragana wu (𛄟) also needs a special font to display such as
 * BabelStone Han
 * IPA MJ Mincho Version 5.01 and later
 * Hanazono Mincho
 * Hanazono Mincho AFDKO
 * UniHentaiKana


 * Uraniwa Mincho X

Sources of hentaigana
Hentaigana are adapted from the reduced and cursive forms of the following man’yōgana (kanji) characters. Source characters for the kana are not repeated below for hentaigana even when there are alternative glyphs; some are uncertain.

In Unicode
286 hentaigana characters are included in the Unicode Standard in the Kana Supplement and Kana Extended-A blocks. One character was added to Unicode version 6.0 in 2010, 𛀁 (U+1B001 HIRAGANA LETTER ARCHAIC YE which has the formal alias HENTAIGANA LETTER E-1), and the remaining 285 hentaigana characters were added in Unicode version 10.0 in June 2017.

The Unicode block for Kana Supplement is U+1B000–U+1B0FF:

The Unicode block for Kana Extended-A is U+1B100–U+1B12F:

Modern usage
Hentaigana are considered obsolete, but a few marginal uses remain. For example, otemoto (chopsticks), is written in hentaigana on some wrappers and many soba shops use hentaigana to spell kisoba on their signs. (See also: "Ye Olde" for "the old" on English signs.)

Hentaigana are used in some formal handwritten documents, particularly in certificates issued by classical Japanese cultural groups (e.g., martial arts schools, etiquette schools, religious study groups, etc.). Also, they are occasionally used in reproductions of classic Japanese texts, akin to blackletter in English and other Germanic languages to give an archaic flair. Modern poems may be composed and printed in hentaigana for visual effect.

However, most Japanese people cannot read hentaigana nowadays, only recognizing a few from their common use in shop signs, or figuring them out from context.

Gallery
Some of the following hentaigana are cursive forms of the same kanji as their standard hiragana counterparts, but simplified differently. Others descend from unrelated kanji that represent the same sound.