Talk:Historical kana orthography

Merge?

I don't know. There's a separate article in ja.wikipedia for ??????, and I've based the English on that (though it has already diverged!). The Japanese article is pretty long, and I'd eventually like to translate more of it.

It makes perfect sense to merge this. There's no rule that there must be a one-to-one correspondence between individual articles in wikipedias of different languages, and there's no real size restriction on articles. — Gwalla | Talk 18:59, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

To me, the merger makes sense because kana article does not need to be limited to modern kana. Please don't hesitate to carry out translation, if the kana article grows too large, we can just split it off. Think, say, some article like History of computing grew too large, so we split it off. But if in some language, the article is still in stub-long length, I don't think that article needs to be splited.. -- Taku 23:17, Aug 6, 2004 (UTC)

Would something like old/new english-katakana belong here? for example, ゼラチン zerachin meaning gelatin, i think was a word japanese borrowed from english a long time ago; now, a word with the (je) sound in it would be ジェネレーション jenereishon meaning generation, (ti) ティー tii meaning tea. - KevinJr42

I'd suggest that this kind of thing would be better treated in Transcribing English to Japanese by inserting a History section. You could go back to really old loanwords, like shingo and ramune adamrice 15:22, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Nihon-shiki romanization?

This article claims to use the Nihon-shiki romanization but seems to use Hepburn in every way that Hepburn differs with Nihon-shiki (see: "sho" as opposed to the Nihon-shiki "syo") —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.78.59.248 (talk) 20:57, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Unmerged

This article was merged into kana. This merge was extremely badly thought out. Even if you agree with merging it somewhere, there was no justification whatsoever for merging this article (about spelling) into the article about kana (about characters). It is something like merging an article on English spelling into an article on the roman alphabet. The merge made absolutely no sense. If it was to be merged it should have been merged into the page Japanese writing system. For the time being I have unmerged it from the kana page. Anyway it's an important topic in its own right and there is little justification for merging it anywhere. --DannyWilde 07:28, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

WE (Ye?) in Ebisu (beer)

There is a Japanese brand of beer called "Ebisu" but spelled "ye-bi-su" using the character ヱ [1]. Now I am confused as to the no-longer-usedness of "ヱ" as well as the pronounciation of it. I saw this spelling frequently in ads in Japan and it was not that many centuries ago either.

As far as I know, "ye" was already written エ around a thousand years ago, since that sound disappeared really early. ヱ is just we, no doubt. However, it should not be surprising that it is used for special effect, just like how people write "ye olde whatever" when they pretend to write older English without realising that the "y" is actually "th"... -- Amorette 18:52, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Some things I can think of.

One thing I think is definitely worth mentioning is the fact that words that contain kana that would be romanised as -kk- were not written with つ: for example, 学校 was written がくかう, rather than がつかう like some might expect.

Also, it says in the article that

"The -fu of the modern -u series of verbs (that is, those verbs using the actual kana う such as kau or omou) were not affected by the sound changes on the surface, however, some reports of Edo era Japanese indicate that verbs like tamau and harau were pronounced as tamō and harō instead"

Well, if you listen to the Gyokuon-hōsō, you would hear that he pronounced 失フ as ushinō... and the speech was made in 1945. Are you people sure that those verbs weren't affected? -- Amorette 18:48, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

My guess is probably since the rescript was in pseudo-archaic Classical Japanese, Emperor Showa might have just mindlessly read 失フ (after all, he or the speech writer was not thinking in terms of sounds when writing in CJ) according to the sound shift rules that say afu->ō. 199.192.229.217 (talk) 04:18, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Romanization

None of the ye examples given in the section actually belong here, as even the text of the article states that it is a result of a sound change and not an orthographic issue. In fact, the examples given in the article had a variety of spellings in the old system: he - Inouye (ゐのうへ, Winouhe), Iyeyasu (いへやす, Iheyasu) and Uyeno (うへの, Uheno); we - yen (ゑん, wen); and plain e/ye - Yedo (えど, Edo/Yedo) and Yezo (えぞ, Ezo/Yezo). I think these examples should be somewhere like Romanization of Japanese (mentions Portuguese-based transliteration methods including ye) or Late Middle Japanese (mentions the merger of /he/ and /we/ into /je/). VonPeterhof (talk) 13:49, 5 February 2017 (UTC)