The ''Irop'a'' is a Korean textbook of the

Japanese language is spoken natively by about 128 million people, primarily by Japanese people and primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language. Japanese belongs to the Japonic or Japanese- Ryukyuan language family. There have been ma ...

published in 1492. It is a source on the phonology of

Late Middle Japanese was a stage of the Japanese language following Early Middle Japanese and preceding Early Modern Japanese. It was a period of transition in which the language shed many of its archaic features and became closer to its modern form. The period s ...

. The ''Irop'a'' is named in official Korean lists of textbooks for Japanese dated 1430, 1469 and 1707. It was presumably revised after the introduction of the

Hangul The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, . Hangul may also be written as following South Korea's standard Romanization. ( ) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The let ...

alphabet in 1446. Only one copy of the ''Irop'a'' is known today, an edition printed in 1492. This copy was in the collection of Kanbara Jinzō, president of

Kagawa University is a national university in Takamatsu, Kagawa, Japan. The university was established in 1949 as a national university after the consolidation and reorganization of the Kagawa Normal School, the Kagawa Normal School for Youth and the Takamatsu Co ...

, and first publicized in 1959. It is now held by the university library. The work begins with four forms of the Japanese syllabary, each in the order of the ''

Iroha The is a Japanese poem. Originally the poem was attributed to the founder of the Shingon Esoteric sect of Buddhism in Japan, Kūkai, but more modern research has found the date of composition to be later in the Heian period (794–1179). The f ...

'' poem:

hiragana is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' literally means "flowing" or "simple" kana ("simple" originally as contrast ...

, two forms of ''mana'' (cursive

Chinese characters Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji' ...

), and

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived fr ...

. Each hiragana syllable is accompanied by a transcription of its sound using Hangul. The hiragana syllabary is followed by Hangul transcriptions of 16 Japanese words, represented by Chinese characters: 'capital', 'above' and the numerals 1 to 10, 100, 1000, 10,000 and 100,000,000. The reasons for including the first two characters are unclear. Following the syllabaries is a brief summary of the Japanese writing system, written in Chinese. The bulk of the text is in Japanese without translation or annotation, consisting of model sentences and descriptions of Japanese people and customs.

Notes

References

Works cited * * * * * * {{refend Joseon dynasty works Late Middle Japanese texts 15th-century books