Richard Wordingham wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
> wrote:
> > i18n@... wrote:
>
> > > How about reforms in Japan that led to the elimination of certain kana
> > > from accepted use - those syllables were replaced with others or
> > > eliminated in the spoken language, as I understand it. I have some old
> > > pre-war grade school texts I have shown to more modern folks and they
> > > were puzzled by some of it.
> >
> > Then you must misunderstand it.
>
> There are a lot of references to /we/ and /wi/ being abolished or
> ceasing to be used - e.g.
> http://www.charm.net/~tomokoy/katakana13.html. Ceasing to be used
> may be more accurate - a bit like Thai kho khuat and kho khon.
> They've got Unicode encodings, so one can easily write text saying
> they aren't used.

"Ceasing to be used" is rather different from "being abolished."

The iroha poem has 50 characters. The kana chart doesn't.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...