JJapanese

Does writing things with deprecated kana convey any sort of nuance other than old-style?

Sorry I don’t think I should ask in r/translator since I’m not asking for a translation so much as a nuance. I recently found a 戸籍謄本 buried deep in my closet for my grandmother, who was from somewhere around the 八戸 area and was born in 1931. She wrote her name in English as Chie but since she died when I was 6 I never got to see how she wrote her name in her native language. Well I finally found out in the family register that her name was written ちゑ (I was surprised her familiar name had no kanji). Does using the ゑ kana instead of the え kana make her name sound more country? Or maybe an artistic touch from her parents? Or just old? Was the ゑ kana still in use a lot in that part of 青森県 in the early 1930s? I know the ゑ was pronounced as え in her name and not as say /we/. Just wondering if her name being spelled ちゑ instead of a more common modern spelling tells anything interesting. It was surprising when I read it was written that way.

3 comments

  2. It’s just old. It stopped being used after the war.

    Also, she’s from Aomori, there is a chance that it was/is pronounced that way with a Tohoku accent as it deviates greatly from stanadard Japanese.

    She might have gone by the standard pronunciation of her name as an adult as the kana would’ve stopped being used by then, doesn’t mean her parents said her name as /we/

  3. I think that by the 1930s the character ゑ had started to lose its intended “ye” sound and most people were just pronuncing it as “e” and it lost any sort of distinction in sound. My understanding is that this is why it was removed from the regular kana alphabet along with a few other characters such as ヰ.

    Having spent a bit of time in the north I can say that most people tend to have a bit of a drawl in how they speak and Chie could easily become closer to “Chiye” which is what it might originally have been intended to sound like.

    Interestingly enough it’s not too rare especially for women of this time period to have first names not written with kanji. I guess it was not seen to be as big of deal at the time, especially in the more rural parts of the country.

    The popular beer “Ebisu” is also written using the katakana equivalent of ゑ (ヱビス) but it’s never pronounced as “Yebisu” by anyone that I’ve ever met.

    It’s one of those anachronisms that remin in Japan. You see these come up now and then and it’s usually one of two things. Trying to look cool by using a rarely seen character, or something that is legitimately old enough to have been around since before the characters were discontinued.

    Let me know if you’d like any more information regarding the 戸籍謄本 document, it sounds interesting.

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