Hiragana: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 03:51, 10 July 2004

Revision as of 17:46, 16 July 2004

Line 16:

*Adding a ''handakuten'' (半濁点) marker ゜ changes ''h''→''p''.

*Adding a small version of the hiragana for ''ya'', ''yu'' or ''yo'' (ゃ, ゅ or ょ respectively) changes a preceding ''i'' vowel sound to a glide [[palatalization]].

*A small ''tsu'' っ indicates a glottal stop. Typically this only appears before consonants that are fricatives or stops. This is representated in [[romaji]] by doubling the following consonant. Occasionally this will follow the last vowel in a word to indicate surprise.

*A small ''tsu'' っ doubles the following consonant.

There are ways to getrepresent even moreother sounds out ofwith hiragana, using "small"miniscule versions of the five vowel kana. However, thisThis is not reallygenerally "proper"used Japanese,in andformal itwriting, but is occasionally used mainlywith toloanwords makein [[katakana]] wordsin an attempt to approximate more closly the source lookword's cutepronunciation.

There are a few hiragana which are not in the standard modern set. ''wi'' ゐ and ''we'' ゑ are obsolete. ''vu'' ゔ is modern and is pronounced as ''bwu'' to approximate the "v" sound in foreign languages such as English (it is rarely seen because transliterated words are usually written in [[katakana]]).