2009-07-30

Migurushiki

Here's the latest installment in my ongoing "dakuten where you wouldn't expect to find them" series:

What we have here is a couple lines from Hachi no ki, as edited by KANZE Sakon XXIV 廿四世観世左近 in the mid-1960s for Hinoki Shoten. Hōjō Tokiyori (the waki of the play), disguised as a traveling priest, is trying to persuade impoverished ex-noble Tsuneyo (the shite) to let him crash during a snowstorm.

シテ「易き御事にて候へども　餘りに見苦しく候程に　お宿ハ叶ひ候まじ
ワキ「いやいや見苦しきは苦しからぬことにて候　平に一夜を御貸し候へ

Tsuneyo: What you ask is simple enough, but my home is too humble; you simply cannot stay here.
Tokiyori: No, no, the humblest of lodgings I would yet humbly accept. Please, allow me to stay here just one night.

Did you spot the extra dakuten? Here's one close-up:

The meaning here is the same as any other dakuten: "the first consonant sound represented by this character is voiced." Thus, this word is pronounced migurushiki. I'm not sure how likely anyone is to say mikurushiki in this case (although there is a pun on regular kurushiki involved too), but the kanji dakuten also turns up in places where there is a geniune ambiguity, like on 嶽 (mountain peak) to indicate that it's dake, not take.

Popularity factor: 6

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Kindaichi:

You may be interested in the newly published 『振仮名の歴史』 by 今野真二, ISBN 978-4-08-720501-5.

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Leonardo Boiko:

And does this one work with Unicode?

いやいや見苦゙゙しきは

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Leonardo Boiko:

In my font rendering pipeline, it resulted with too little spacing before the し. If there is a reasonable number of kanji dakuten uses, I say this should be supported… but who to send a bug report to? Sazanami Gothic? Pango? The Unicode consortium?

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Carl:

It looks like you're using one ten-ten too many:

いやいや見苦゙しきは

Strangely, here on OS X, there's too big of a gap between the guru and the shi in a Safari text box or rendered on the page, but not if you paste it into the address bar or other applications…

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Peter:

What's harder to do without furigana is getting people to not pronounce the consonant voiced, when it is usually is. (e.g. 誰)

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Matt:

Hm, I guess if it's a rendering bug the people to contact would be Apple. First we need some cross-browser testing and input from the Noh community.... Behold, after walking many days I have arrived at the Noh community. I shall now dance my request.

Peter: Good point -- I wonder if anyone has ever come up with an ad hoc solution for that.

Kindaichi: Indeed I am extremely interested in the newly published 振仮名の歴史. I'm actually right in the middle of Konno's (nerdy and fascinating) "消された漱石", too. Thanks for the tip!

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