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The historical kana orthography (歴史的仮名遣い, rekishiteki kanazukai), or old orthography (旧仮名遣い, kyū kanazukai), refers to the kana orthography (正仮名遣い, sei kana-zukai) in general use until orthographic reforms after World War II; the current orthography was adopted by Cabinet order in 1946. [1]
Special kana orthography of the early era) is an archaic kana orthography system used to write Old Japanese during the Nara period. Its primary feature is to distinguish between two groups of syllables that later merged. The existence and meaning of this system is a critical point of scholarly debate in the study of the history of the Japanese ...
In the 1900 kana usage reforms, hentaigana (old variant forms of kana) were eliminated, though historical kana orthography (dating to the Heian period, a millennium before) was retained. A separate character for n ん was also prescribed; previously it had been written as む (the same as mu ) and ん was a hentaigana for both these sounds.
Kanazukai (仮 (か) 名 (な) 遣 (づか) い, ‘kana usage’) are the orthographic rules for spelling Japanese in kana. All phonographic systems (of which kana is an example) attempt to account accurately the pronunciation in their spellings. However, pronunciation and accents change over time and phonemic distinctions are often lost.
'Kana' is a compound of kari (仮, 'borrowed; assumed; false') and na (名, 'name'), which eventually collapsed into kanna and ultimately 'kana'. [3]Today it is generally assumed that 'kana' were considered "false" kanji due to their purely phonetic nature, as opposed to mana which were "true" kanji used for their meanings.
In some cases, specific syllables in particular words are consistently represented by specific characters. That usage is known as Jōdai Tokushu Kanazukai and usage has led historical linguists to conclude that certain disparate sounds in Old Japanese, consistently represented by differing sets of man'yōgana characters, may have merged since then.
Modern kana usage (現代仮名遣い, gendai kanazukai) is the present official kanazukai (system of spelling the Japanese syllabary). Also known as new kana usage ( 新仮名遣い , shin kanazukai ) , it is derived from historical usage .
The classical Japanese language (文語, bungo, "literary language"), also called "old writing" (古文, kobun) and sometimes simply called "Medieval Japanese", is the literary form of the Japanese language that was the standard until the early Shōwa period (1926–1989).