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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]
For example, while the hiragana reading "ha" has only one form in modern Japanese (は), until the Meiji era (1868–1912) it was written in various forms, including , , and . The shift to using only one character for each sound occurred as part of the 1900 script reform , [ 3 ] [ 4 ] which also included other changes to the written language to ...
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.
There are a small number of municipalities in Japan whose names are written in hiragana or katakana, together known as kana, rather than kanji as is traditional for Japanese place names. [1] Many city names written in kana have kanji equivalents that are either phonetic manyōgana , or whose kanji are outside of the jōyō kanji .
Japanese does not have separate l and r sounds, and l-is normally transcribed using the kana that are perceived as representing r-. [2] For example, London becomes ロンドン (Ro-n-do-n). Other sounds not present in Japanese may be converted to the nearest Japanese equivalent; for example, the name Smith is written スミス (Su-mi-su).
The Wiktionary uses the English word dictionary to define a few synonyms including lexicon, wordbook, vocabulary, thesaurus, and translating dictionary. It also uses dictionary to translate six Japanese words. jiten (辞典, lit. "word reference-work") "dictionary; lexicon; glossary" jiten (字典, lit. "character reference-work") "character ...
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.
Some Japanese expressions are only understandable when one has knowledge of the Iroha. The word iroha (イロハ, often in katakana) itself can mean "the basics" in Japanese, comparable to the term "the ABCs" in English. Similarly, Iroha no i (イロハのイ) means "the most basic element of all". I no ichiban (いの一番, "number one of i ...