🎄 2023 Aozora Short Story and Essay Advent ☃

pm215 · November 23, 2023, 8:26pm

As promised, here is…

A Bluffer’s Guide to Old Kana Spellings

With a little practice, reading a text in the historical kana spelling (歴史的仮名遣い) isn’t too hard. The rules for converting old spellings to new are fairly mechanical, but you can also get a long way by treating it like an unknown dialect and trusting that if it looks roughly like what a plausible sentence would be then it probably does mean that; for instance 御存じでせうね is 御存じでしょうね.

Old spelling texts may also use old unsimplified kanji, be freer with kanji choices, not use exactly the same division into kanji and okurigana as modern conventions, and use kanji in places like “grammar” words that are usually written in kana today. I don’t try to address any of that here.

I’ve ordered the subtopics below starting with the simpler and more useful ones.

No small kana

Old spellings use regular size kana where modern spelling uses small kana:

怒つた → 怒った

そりや → そりゃ (i.e. contraction of それは)

ピヨン／＼ → ピョンピョン (note also the use here of the multi kana repeat mark)

Extra kana ゐ and ゑ

The “w” column of the kana chart has two extra kana: ゐ “wi”, pronounced い, and ゑ “we”, pronounced え. Modern spelling turned all the uses of these into い and え. You’ll also see を used to write the お sound in more places than just the object-marking particle.

思つてゐます → 思っています (you’ll see ゐ a lot because it’s used to spell いる)

をかしい → おかしい

こゑ → こえ (声)

は column kana pronounced wa / i / u / e / o except at beginning of a word

In modern spelling the only places a は column kana is pronounced oddly are the topic particle は and the direction particle へ. In old spelling whenever a は column kana appears somewhere not at the start of a word it’s pronounced like the わ column kana (i.e. wa i u e o):

いふ → いう (to say)

思へます → 思えます

似合はない → 似合わない

More use of ぢ and づ

Modern spelling uses ぢ and づ rarely. They’re more common in old spellings; read them as じ and ず, as you do already.

歌ひくづす → 歌いくずす (歌い崩す)

くわ for か

The か sound might be written くわ; similarly が can be written ぐわ.

くわんのん → かんのん (観音, the goddess)

さんぐわつ → さんがつ (三月)

Long vowel spellings

Sound changes over the centuries mean that various long vowels are written oddly. Here I’ve used romaji to indicate that the transformation holds for any kana ending with that sound. Where the right hand side has a y that means in modern spelling the word has a small ゃ, ゅ or ょ.

-au → -ou

Xのやう → Xのよう (the grammar point よう)

さう思へます → そう思えます

きしやう → きしょう (気象)

-iu → -yuu

りう → りゅう (竜)

-eu and -ehu → -you

でせう → でしょう

けふ → きょう (今日)