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Hiragana (平仮名, ひらがな, IPA: [çiɾaɡaꜜna, çiɾaɡana(ꜜ)]) 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 means "common" or "plain" kana (originally also "easy", as contrasted with kanji). [1] [2] [3]
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
Kana Supplement (Unicode block) has a single katakana and 255 hentaigana characters; Kana Extended-A (Unicode block) continues with additional 31 hentaigana characters; Kana Extended-B (Unicode block) continues with additional kana for Taiwanese Hokkien; Small Kana Extension (Unicode block) has four hiragana characters: U+1B132 and U+1B150–U+ ...
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
In current usage, kana most commonly refers to hiragana [1] and katakana. It can also refer to their ancestor magana ( 真仮名 , lit. 'true kana') , [ 2 ] which were Chinese characters used phonetically to transcribe Japanese (e.g. man'yōgana ); and hentaigana , which are historical variants of the now-standard hiragana.
Small Kana Extension is a Unicode block containing additional small variants for the Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries, [3] in addition to those in the Hiragana, Katakana and Katakana Phonetic Extensions blocks.
(Previously mu (hiragana む) was used for this sound.) The gojūon contains all the basic kana, but it does not include: versions of kana with a dakuten such as が (ga) or だ (da), or kana with handakuten such as ぱ (pa) or ぷ (pu), smaller kana (sutegana), such as the sokuon (っ) or in the yōon (ゃ,ゅ,ょ).
The charts below show the way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents Japanese language pronunciations in Wikipedia articles. For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters.