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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]
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.
Usually, hiragana is the default syllabary, and katakana is used in certain special cases. Hiragana is used to write native Japanese words with no kanji representation (or whose kanji is thought obscure or difficult), as well as grammatical elements such as particles and inflections . Today katakana is most commonly used to write words of ...
In contrast to the hiragana syllabary, which is used for Japanese words not covered by kanji and for grammatical inflections, the katakana syllabary usage is comparable to italics in English; specifically, it is used for transcription of foreign-language words into Japanese and the writing of loan words (collectively gairaigo); for emphasis; to ...
One of the various meanings of the verb haneru (撥ねる) is to "make an upward brush-stroke" when writing, [10] which is a gesture that is involved in writing the kana ん and ン. Another meaning is rather specific, to 'pronounce "n" as a syllabic consonant', [ 10 ] in other words, to make the sounds represented by the kana ん and ン.
Ya (hiragana: や, katakana: ヤ) is one of the Japanese kana, each of which represents one mora. The hiragana is written in three strokes, while the katakana is written in two. Both represent [ja]. Their shapes have origins in the character 也.
Furigana is most often written in hiragana, though in certain cases it may be written in katakana, Roman alphabet letters or in other, simpler kanji. In vertical text, tategaki, the furigana is placed to the right of the line of text; in horizontal text, yokogaki, it is placed above the line of text, as illustrated below.
For example, the word 構想 is written in hiragana as こうそう (kousou), pronounced kōsō. In a few words the character お (o) is used instead for morphological or historical reasons. The character ウ can take dakuten to form ヴ (vu), a sound foreign to the Japanese language and traditionally approximated by ブ (bu).