#kanazukai

[onecoloroneday]

Jōdai Tokushu Kanazukai

[datasoong47]

Interesting!  Apparently the handakuten (the circle diacritic that distinguishes, for example, ぱ from は was invented by foreign missionaries, rather than a native invention!  From this book on the History of the Japanese Language I’m reading:

The limited contexts in which /p/ was preserved were readily recognizable and a specific way of writing /p/ as distinct from /f/ did not develop in the MJ period. However, towards the end of the LMJ period Portuguese Jesuit missionaries instituted the use of a circle on the top right corner of a kana for contemporary fV (present-day hV) in order to write unambiguously pV, e.g., は (fa/ha), ぱ (pa).  This was first used in the Rakuyōshū, a kanji dictionary published by the Jesuit press in Amakusa in 1598.  Since then this practice spread and is, of course, today a fully integrated feature of Japanese writing.

In Middle Japanese, what is today /h/ was /f/, i.e., the h-row was an f-row, fa fi fu fe fo.

Also interesting is that the man’yōgana, the earliest ancestor of kana, used distinct characters for both voiced and voiceless obstruents, but early on dropped that distinction, so that voicing was often not distinguished in the Middle Japanese period.

In specialized writing, however, various means were used, when it was thought necessary, to give a more precise indication of the phonological shape of a word, noting whether a syllable was sei [voiceless] or daku [voiced], or its phonological pitch.  This was mostly done by diacritics, but there are also cases of, for example, inverted kana being used to specify a daku’on [voiced consonant] .... EMJ texts in which sei-daku [voicing] (or pitch) was noted were almost entirely annotations or dictionaries, and sei-daku thus remained un-noted in general writing in the EMJ period.  During the LMJ period (Kamakura), annotations of EMJ texts in Japanese to specify features of pronunciation along these lines became current, but it was not until the NJ [Modern Japanese] period, from the beginning of the Edo period, that the dakuten we know today became established and widespread in general writing.

Imagine if that inverted character convention had won out ...