Ah, well, I'm easily defeated even by modern calligraphy. I rely on contemporary editions where scholars have done most of the heavy lifting, such as putting in the dakuten. Plus, it helps that I'm not working in the really old stuff written in man'yogana, as that stuff makes my head hurt -- the Kokinshu poets wrote solidly in the period of kanji+hiragana.

Scholar, I am not. Fortunately, there's a lot of material aimed at Japanese non-scholars that explains the archaisms.

---L.