Chart showing various Japanese characters in their man'yōgana, sōgana (red), and hiragana forms.

Sōgana (草仮名; lit. "grass kana") are cursive forms of man'yōgana used in the historical development of Japanese kana. They occupy an intermediate stage between Chinese characters used phonographically and forms recognizable as hiragana; unlike later hiragana, they had not fully lost the visual identity of their source characters.[1]

History and terminology

Sōgana emerged around the middle of the ninth century as cursive man'yōgana were progressively simplified. By the early eleventh century a hiragana syllabary broadly resembling the modern one existed, although more than one character form for the same sound remained in use.[1][2] The earliest securely dated surviving text written extensively in early hiragana is the Uten shōmon of 867; surviving materials from the developmental period are scarce, and not every early cursive form is necessarily classified as sōgana in the narrower calligraphic sense.[3]

Historical literary evidence also records the name. The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten cites さうがな in the Utsubo Monogatari (c. 970–999) and a reference to sōgana in The Pillow Book near the end of the tenth century.[1] Discussions of related writing also occur in other Heian works, including the Eiga Monogatari.[4]

Calligraphic use and surviving works

A section of the Akihagi-jō, an eleventh- or twelfth-century poetry scroll traditionally attributed to Ono no Michikaze; its opening sheet uses archaic sōgana.

From the tenth century onward, sōgana also continued as a deliberately complex calligraphic style, used alone or together with hiragana, especially for poetry.[1] The style associated with Fujiwara no Yukinari (also known as Kōzei) is often cited as characteristic.[5]

The Akihagi-jō, held by the Tokyo National Museum, provides a surviving example. Its first sheet contains two waka in an archaic sōgana style, while other sheets also include poetry in cursive kana; the work is dated to the eleventh or twelfth century and is only purportedly attributed to Ono no Michikaze.[6] Traditional attributions of sōgana exemplars to Michikaze or Yukinari are often uncertain: no surviving kana work can be securely assigned to Michikaze, and works attributed to Yukinari also lack conclusive proof.[7]

Sōgana remained a model for later calligraphers rather than serving only as an extinct transitional script. A late-sixteenth-century waka by Sonchō, for example, uses highly cursive phonographic kanji identified by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as sōgana.[8]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 草仮名. 百科事典マイペディア (in Japanese). Retrieved 11 August 2026 – via Kotobank.
  2. ↑ McCullough, William H. (1999). "The Heian court, 794–1070". The Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 2. Cambridge University Press. p. 416. ISBN 978-0-521-22353-9.
  3. ↑ Yada, Tsutomu. 平仮名は誰が作ったのですか. ことば研究館 (in Japanese). National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. Retrieved 11 August 2026.
  4. ↑ Seeley, Christopher (1991). A History of Writing in Japan. Japanese Studies Library. Brill. p. 80. ISBN 978-90-04-09081-1.
  5. ↑ Murray, Julia K. (1979). A Decade of Discovery: Selected Acquisitions, 1970–1980. Freer Gallery of Art. p. 56. ISBN 978-0-934686-36-5.
  6. ↑ "Akihagi-jō Poetry Anthology". e-Museum. National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, Japan. Retrieved 11 August 2026.
  7. ↑ LaMarre, Thomas (2000). Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription. Duke University Press. p. 86. ISBN 978-0-8223-2518-5.
  8. ↑ "Waka Poem". The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved 11 August 2026.
allikas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sōgana