Kana ligature
Ligatures in the kana writing system
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In the Japanese writing system, kana ligatures (Japanese: 合略仮名, Hepburn: gōryaku-gana) are ligatures in the kana writing system, both hiragana and katakana. Kana such as koto (ヿ; from 事) and shite (𬼀; from 為) are not kana ligatures, but polysyllabic kana. Most of such ligatures and polysyllabic kanas became obsolete.
Hardly any kana ligatures or polysyllabic kanas are represented in standard character encodings.
History
These characters were widely used until a spelling reform decreed that each sound (mora) would be represented by one (kana) character. In January 1900, the Kana Investigation Committee (仮名調査委員) passed a resolution to "limit the number of homophone kana characters to one each" and aimed to abolish hentaigana, iteration marks, long-vowel marks, jionkanazukai, the characters ゐ/ヰ (wi) and ゑ/ヱ (we), as well as the ligatures and the polysyllabic kanas.[1]
Kana ligatures such as 
(toki), 
(koto), etc., were actively used in Japan during the Edo and Meiji periods. These ligatures were sometimes placed together along with the hiragana and katakana syllabaries in Japanese school textbooks.[2] Nowadays, these ligatures are obsolete and are not taught at schools anymore.[3]
Encoding standards
(koto) and (toki) can be seen listed among the other kanas[4]These ligatures were not represented in computer character encodings until JIS X 0213:2000 (JIS2000) added ゟ (yori) and ヿ (koto). In 2002, ヿ and ゟ were added to Unicode 3.2. In October 2009, 𪜈 (tomo) was added to Unicode 5.2 in the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C block. In June 2017, 𬼀 (shite), 𬼂 (nari), and 𬻿 (nari) were added to Unicode 10.0 in the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension F block.[5]
List
Hiragana ligature
Polysyllabic hiragana
Katakana ligature
Polysyllabic katakana
In Unicode
| Preview |  |  |  |  |  |  | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | HIRAGANA DIGRAPH YORI | KATAKANA DIGRAPH KOTO | CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-2A708 | CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-2CEFF | CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-2CF00 | CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-2CF02 | ||||||
| Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex |
| Unicode | 12447 | U+309F | 12543 | U+30FF | 173832 | U+2A708 | 184063 | U+2CEFF | 184064 | U+2CF00 | 184066 | U+2CF02 |
| UTF-8 | 227 130 159 | E3 82 9F | 227 131 191 | E3 83 BF | 240 170 156 136 | F0 AA 9C 88 | 240 172 187 191 | F0 AC BB BF | 240 172 188 128 | F0 AC BC 80 | 240 172 188 130 | F0 AC BC 82 |
| UTF-16 | 12447 | 309F | 12543 | 30FF | 55401 57096 | D869 DF08 | 55411 57087 | D873 DEFF | 55411 57088 | D873 DF00 | 55411 57090 | D873 DF02 |
| Numeric character reference | ゟ | ゟ | ヿ | ヿ | 𪜈 | 𪜈 | 𬻿 | 𬻿 | 𬼀 | 𬼀 | 𬼂 | 𬼂 |
See also
