Information About ®Iroha |
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THE TEXT The text of the poem in Hiragana (with archaic ゐ and ゑ but without voiced consonant marks) is: The text of the poem in Kanji and Kana , voiced where appropriate, is: The poem exhibits the 7-5-syllable repeated verse structure. An English translation: As flowers are brilliant but who could remain constant in our world? Today let us transcend the high mountain of transience, and there will be no more shallow dreaming, no more drunkenness. SOUND CHANGE The iroha is used as an indicator of Sound Change s in the spoken Japanese language in the Heian era. Strictly transliterated the poem runs: i ro ha ni ho he to chi ri nu ru (w)o wa ka yo ta re so tsu ne na ra mu u (w)i no o ku ya ma ke fu ko e te a sa ki yu me mi shi (w)e hi mo se su To obtain the meaning indicated above, one must read the poem with some flexibility. These changes yield: Iro wa nioedo Chirinuru o Wa ga yo tare zo Tsune naran Ui no okuyama Kyō koete Asaki yume miji Ei mo sezu. USAGE The iroha contains every Kana precisely once, with the exception of ん {Link without Title} , which was added to the syllabary later. For this reason, the poem was frequently used as an ordering of the kana until the Meiji Era reforms in the 19th century. Thereafter the '' Gojūon '' (五十音, literally "fifty sounds") ordering system became more common. This order is partly based on Sanskrit . It begins with "a, i, u, e, o" then "ka, ki, ku..." and so on for each kana used in Japanese. Although the iroha is seen as more "old fashioned" than the gojūon, the earliest known copy of the gojūon predates the iroha. The iroha is still occasionally encountered in modern Japan. For example, it is used for seat numbering in theaters, and (from right to left) across the top of Go game diagrams ( Kifu ), as in Yasunari Kawabata's Meijin . In music, the Note s of an Octave are named i ro ha ni ho he to, written in Katakana . The word いろは (iroha) can also be used to mean "ABCs" or "the basics" in Japanese. Although the Japanese employ the Heavenly Stems for rank order besides both the Chinese and Arabic numerals as well as the Latin alphabet, the iroha sequence was used to note the rank of submarines of the Imperial Japanese Navy during the Second World War. All long-range submarines had designations beginning with "I" (e.g., the largest submarine had "I400" painted on its conning tower), coastal submarines began with "Ro", and training or marginally usable submarines had "Ha". ORIGIN Authorship is traditionally ascribed to the Heian era Japanese Buddhist priest and scholar Kūkai (空海) ( 774 – 835 ). However, this is unlikely as it is believed that in his time there were separate ''e'' sounds in the ''a'' and ''ya'' columns of the Kana table. The え (''e'') above would have been pronounced ''ye'', making the pangram incomplete. It is said that the ''iroha'' is a transformation of these verses in the '' Nirvana Sutra '': :諸行無常 :是生滅法 :生滅滅已 :寂滅為楽 which translates into That everything is Impermanent Is the way all things come into and go out of existence. It is when these processes are over That we see true happiness in Nirvana . The above in Japanese is read Shogyōmujō Zeshōmeppō Shōmetsumetsui Jakumetsuiraku SEE ALSO
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