Celebrating Deviation: Introducing Markup Options for Variant Japanese Phonetic Characters known as Hentaigana

In digitalizing the manuscript heritage of secret writings by the Japanese 15th century actor, playwright, producer, and teacher Zeami, I am including the premodern script variations known as hentaigana now available in Unicode. Hentaigana are variant hiragana, phonetic characters that are used to write various Japanese grammatical and function words and often ruby, for which the TEI released elements last year. In 2017, Unicode formally added 285 hentaigana characters in their Kana Supplement and Kana Extended-A code charts. These alternatives are fluid or cursive abbreviations of various “parent characters,” phonetically used Chinese characters (kanji), with varying patterns and degrees of simplification. In encoding both the modern, standardized hiragana and hentaigana, this project makes the manuscripts more accessible to learners of Japanese premodern script. Comparisons of the variants in different text witnesses using such markup might be useful for future analyses of text genealogy.

In this poster, I will present my methods for systematically including hentaigana developed while transcribing manuscript witnesses of Zeami’s writings and explain my inclusion of the “old character forms” (kyūjitai) of kanji using similar markup. I will furthermore share initial orthographical explorations of texts encoded thus far and consider methods for sharing the project with digitally savvy users, noh theater experts with no IT background, and educated non-specialists.