Hiragana

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 (Chinese characters).

It is a phonetic lettering system. The word hiragana means "common" or "plain" kana (originally also "easy", as contrasted with kanji).

Historically, hiragana developed from cursive forms of Kanji (sōsho (草書)) via man'yōgana (万葉仮名), with each sign originating as a simplified cursive rendering of a whole kanji—for example, あ (a) from 安 (an).

Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems. With few exceptions, each mora in the Japanese language is represented by one character (or one digraph) in each system. This may be a vowel such as /a/ (hiragana あ); a consonant followed by a vowel such as /ka/ (か); or the nasal sonorant /N/ (ん). Because the characters of the kana do not represent single consonants (except in the case of the aforementioned ん), the kana are referred to as syllabic symbols and not alphabetic letters.

Hiragana is used to write okurigana (kana suffixes following a kanji root, for example to inflect verbs and adjectives), various grammatical and function words including particles, and miscellaneous other native words for which there are no kanji or whose kanji form is obscure or too formal for the writing purpose. Words that do have common kanji renditions may also sometimes be written instead in hiragana, according to an individual author's preference, for example to impart an informal feel. Hiragana is also used to write furigana, a reading aid that shows the pronunciation of kanji characters.

There are two main systems of ordering hiragana: the old-fashioned iroha ordering and the more prevalent gojūon ordering.

After the 1900 script reform, which deemed hundreds of characters hentaigana, the hiragana syllabary consists of 48 base characters, of which two (ゐ and ゑ) are only used in some proper names:

These are conceived as a 5×10 grid (gojūon, 五十音, "Fifty Sounds"), as illustrated in the adjacent table, read あ (a), い (i), う (u), え (e), お (o), か (ka), き (ki), く (ku), け (ke), こ (ko) and so forth (but si→shi, ti→chi, tu→tsu, hu→fu, wi→i, we→e, wo→o). Of the 50 theoretically possible combinations, yi, ye, and wu are completely unused. On the w row, ゐ and ゑ, pronounced [i] and [e] respectively, are uncommon in modern Japanese, while を, pronounced [o], is common as a particle but otherwise rare. Strictly speaking, the singular consonant ん (n) is considered to be outside the gojūon.