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皆さん、こんにちは！

Now, I've been reading 竹取物語 and have come across (another) set of symbols that I've yet to understand. Given the following sentence.

かくて翁やう／＼豐になり行く。

What does the sudden 「／＼」 mean?

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    Could it possibly be the vertical iteration mark? See here. By the definition in the wiki, I believe this sentence would then mean かくて翁やうやう豐になり行く。My Japanese is unfortunately too limited to parse this sentence though.
    – Enrico Borba
    Dec 30, 2016 at 20:41
  • See this article about iteration marks in Japanese:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iteration_mark#Japanese
    – kandyman
    May 19, 2018 at 12:08

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14

This is supposed to be an iteration mark.

This type of iteration mark is usually only used in vertical writing (the traditional layout for Japanese writing). It looks like a big く but is twice as tall.

It also exists in Unicode, so I can try to produce it here, although it may not render nicely:

や
う
〱

(Wikipedia does a better job and has more examples.)

The characters ／＼ are often (ab)used to represent the vertical iteration mark in horizontal writing.

So,

やう／＼ = やうやう = ようよう = 漸う

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  • ようよう？ Cool, thx lad! :D
    – Tirous
    Dec 31, 2016 at 1:45

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