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At university our most learned lecturer in Japanese once mentioned there were
non-phonetic usages of hiragana at the end of kanji verbs and adjectives pre
WWII. Apparently books printed prewar used this writing system, meaning old
prints are illegible to modern Japanese speakers!

This was said to be similar to English spelling in that kana were pronounced
differently to normal sounds based on their position at the end of the word.

Does anyone know of this spelling system? Can you explain how it worked?

My izakaya zatsugaku won't be complete without this and I've wondered about
this for years!
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history spelling obsolete-kana
Can anyone explain the obsolete, non-phonetic use of hiragana from pre war times?
There is
[indeed](http://members.jcom.home.ne.jp/w3c/kokugo/rekishi/GendaiKanadsukaiS21.html)
some kanji system changed at 昭和２１年１１月６日（1946 Nov 6) by Prime Minister Yoshida
Shigeru 「吉田茂」

And according some sentences in
[this](http://www.geocities.jp/nkcjw883/maruya.html) page, Meiji ７年 (1874),
**Katakana** is used instead Hiragana that we use nowadays.

> 明治７年…西周「洋字 **ヲ** 以 **テ** 国語 **ヲ** 書 **スルノ** 論」を発表

ps: This is what I can figured out now, but may be not complete yet as a
answer to your question.

ref:

  * <http://members.jcom.home.ne.jp/w3c/kokugo/rekishi/GendaiKanadsukaiS21.html>
  * <http://www.geocities.jp/nkcjw883/maruya.html>
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It seems like there's a continuing series over here. :)

If you collects [some](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/376/in-
which-dialects-have-the-sounds-wi-and-we-been-preserved-and-are-t) of
[my](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/379/why-are-the-particles-
hawa-hee-and-woo-not-spelled-phoneti)
[answers](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/348/why-is-pronounced-
as-when-used-as-a-topic-particle) since the beginning of the beta, you can get
a partial answer to your question, but that's not a full answer to your
question, and frankly, a full explanation would require explaining the entire
pronunciation system of the [historical kana
usage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_kana_usage) (歴史的仮名遣い), as it is
called, and this should hopefully go one day into the Wikipedia article, not
into a Stack Exchange answer. :)

Still, I can give you a few points that should explain the general gist of
that. But first, we have to see how Old Japanese (the Japanese spoken circa
800 CE) sounded:

>   1. The pronunciation of all columns was more persistent. For instance, ち
> was probably pronounced `TI` instead of `CHI`, and じ was pronounced `ZI`
> instead of `JI`.
>
>   2. entire H-column (は行) was pronounced (persistently) with the sound /p/.
> i.e. は was `PA`, へ was `PE`, ふ was `P`U, etc.
>
>   3. There were a few kana symbols that represent sounds that don't exist
> anymore: を represented `WO`, ゑ represented `WE` and ゐ represented `WI`. `WO`
> now represents the sound `O`, which but the separate letter still remains
> and it is used more or less exclusively for the particle を. The other two
> letters (ゐ and ゑ) have been removed from the alphabet in [the reform of
> 1946](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_spelling_reform#Reforms).
>
>

During the time that passed since then, the spoken Japanese language has
naturally changed quite a bit, and many sounds have been either lost or
transformed:

>   1. The consonant `/p/` became `/f/` and later `/h/` (though the
> pronunciation `/f/` remained before the vowel `/u/`.
>
>   2. Between vowels, however, the consonant `/p/` usually changed to `/w/`
> and merged with the existing 4 sounds in the W-column (わ・ゐ・ゑ・を), while ふ
> merged with う (since there was no separate letter or sound for `WU`).
>
>   3. Later still, the sound /w/ disappeared anywhere except for before the
> vowel `/a/`, so ゐ・ゑ・を merged with い・え・お.
>
>   4. At more or less the same time, there were some vowel contractions (
> _monophthongizations_ in linguistic techspeak) that caused adjacent pairs of
> vowels to be pronounced like one (usually long) vowel. These included the
> following:
>
>     * あう -> おお (remember that also includes わふ -> わう -> をお -> おお etc.)
>     * おう -> おお (including をふ, をう and おふ)
>     * えい -> ええ (including ゑい, えひ, etc.)
>     * いう -> ゅう (e.g. 十, which was `jip` in Middle Chinese and じふ in Old
> Japanese, became じゅう).
>     * えう -> ゃう -> ょう (e.g. けふ in 今日 become きょう)
>   5. It should be noted that small kana wasn't used (at least most of the
> time) in the old kana usage, so じゃない would have been written じやない, and あった
> would have been written あつた.
>
>

While all these changes occurred, the spelling conventions remained mostly
unchanged. There were some attempts at reform during the Meiji period, but
besides throwing away the
[Hentaigana](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentaigana), they didn't work out.
If we look back at the situation before WWII, the pronunciation was more or
less the same as today, but words were being spelled as if they were
pronounced in Old Japanese, which was quite confusing since a word pronounced
in one way could be written in several different ways even when it was written
in kana (not to mention kanji :)), and you had to know which of them was the
correct one.

Some interesting examples are:

>   * オウ (応), ワウ (王), アフ (凹), ヲウ (翁), ワフ (奥). All are now normalized as オウ.
>   * All the verbs now ending in う used to end in ふ, 闘う・戦いたい was 戦ふ・戦ひたい.
>

(note that the spelling おう, which is pronounced the same as おお, along with the
spelling えい, which is pronounced the same as ええ are the only two old spellings
that remain in use).

You can find more examples and information
[here](http://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/historical-kana-usage.html) (although the
article at this link has a few minor mistakes).
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