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Concept
Iroha
Summary
The Iroha is a Japanese poem. Originally the poem was attributed to Kūkai, the founder of Shingon Buddhism, but more modern research has found the date of composition to be later in the Heian period (794–1179). The first record of its existence dates from 1079. It is famous because it is a perfect pangram, containing each character of the Japanese syllabary exactly once. Because of this, it is also used as an ordering for the syllabary, in the same way as the A, B, C, D... sequence of the Latin alphabet.
The first appearance of the Iroha, in Konkōmyōsaishōōkyō Ongi was in seven lines: six with seven morae each, and one with five. It was also written in man'yōgana.
以呂波耳本部止
千利奴流乎和加
餘多連曽津祢那
良牟有為能於久
耶万計不己衣天
阿佐伎喩女美之
恵比毛勢須
Structurally, however, the poem follows the standard 7–5 pattern of Japanese poetry (with one hypometric line), and in modern times it is generally written that way, in contexts where line breaks are used. The text of the poem in hiragana (with archaic ゐ and ゑ but without voiced consonant marks) is:
Note that:
Archaic, obsolete, and historical hiragana uses ゐ (historic Japanese wi, modern i) and ゑ (historic Japanese we, modern e), which are now only used in proper names and certain Okinawan orthographies. Modern writing uses voiced consonant marks (with dakuten). This is used as an indicator of sound changes in the spoken Japanese language in the Heian era.
The consonant /h/ in Japanese (a voiceless glottal fricative) was historically pronounced as /ɸ/ (a voiceless bilabial fricative) before the occurrence of the so-called hagyō tenko (“'H'-row (kana) sound shift”, ). Due to phonological changes over history, the pangram poem no longer matches today's pronunciation of modern kana.
The syllable e (spelt え & 衣) and ye had merged into /je/ in the 10th century, slightly before the poem was written down in 1079.
Note 1: The verb form 酔い ("being intoxicated; intoxication") may be read in modern kana pronunciation as either ei, the archaic pronunciation based on the original kana spelling ゑひ (wefi in Classical Japanese), or as yoi, the modern reading after sound changes caused the base verb form eu to shift to you.
Official source
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