CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

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Chapter 2: Writing Systems and Scripts

for the purposes of creating Japanese text using a Chinese or Korean character set.

*

Aer

all, many of the ideographs are common across these locales.

e following sections provide detailed information about kana, along with how they

were derived from ideographs.

Hiragana

Hiragana ( hiragana) are characters that represent sounds, specically syllables.

A syllable is generally composed of a consonant plus a vowel—sometimes a single vowel

will do. In Japanese, there are ve vowels: a, i, u, e, and o; and 14 basic consonants: k, s, t,

n, h, m, y, r, w, g, z, d, b, and p. It is important to understand that hiragana is a syllabary,

not an alphabet: you cannot decompose a hiragana character into a part that represents

the vowel and a part that represents the consonant. Hiragana (and katakana, covered in

the next section) is one of the only true syllabaries still in common use today. Table 2-18

illustrates a matrix containing the basic and extended hiragana syllabary.

e hiragana syllabaryTable 2-18.

K S T N H M Y R W G Z D B P

A

              

I

             

U

             

E

             

O

              

N



e following are some notes to accompany Table 2-18:

Several hiragana have smaller versions, and are as follows (the standard version is in •

parentheses):  (),  (), ...