In the Japanese writing system, hentaigana are obsolete or nonstandard hiragana. They include both stylistic variants of current hiragana and distinct alternative hiragana characters. Today, with a few exceptions, there is only one hiragana for each of the fifty consonant–vowelsequences in Japanese. However, traditionally there were generally several more-or-less interchangeable hiragana for each. A 1900 script reform ordained that only one selected character be used for each mora, with the rest deemed hentaigana. Although not normally used in publication, hentaigana are still used in shop signs and brand names to create a traditional or antiquated air. Hiragana originate in man'yōgana, a system where kanji were used to write sounds without regard to their meaning. There was more than one kanji that could be used equivalently for each syllable. Over time the man'yōgana was reduced to a cursive form, the hiragana. Many hentaigana derive from different kanji from the ones for the now-standard hiragana, but some are the result of different styles of cursive writing. As hentaigana have derived from man'yōgana, there are hundreds of different hentaigana used to represent only 90 moras of the Japanese language. On the other hand, katakana do not have hentaigana. Katakana's choices of man'yōgana segments had stabilized early on and established – with few exceptions – an unambiguous phonemic orthography long before the 1900 script regularization.
Standardized ''hentaigana''
Prior to 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.
a
i
u
e
o
∅
∅
k
k
s
s
t
t
n
n
h
h
m
m
y
y
r
r
w
w
n'
-
-
-
-
n'
-
-
-
-
To view hentaigana, special fonts need to be installed that support Hentaigana such as
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, ?, 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:
The hiragana syllabic n derives from a cursive form of the character 无, and originally signified, the same as む. The spelling reform of 1900 separated the two uses, declaring that む could only be used for and ん could only be used for syllable-final Previously, in the absence of a character for the syllable-final, the sound was spelled identically to, and readers had to rely on context to determine what was intended. This ambiguity has led to some modern expressions based on what are, in effect, spelling pronunciations.
Hentaigana are considered obsolete, but a few marginal uses remain. For example, otemoto, is written in hentaigana on some wrappers and many soba shops use hentaigana to spell kisoba on their signs. Hentaigana are used in some formal handwritten documents, particularly in certificates issued by classical Japanese cultural groups. Also, they are occasionally used in reproductions of classic Japanese texts, akin to the use of 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 are unable to 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.
