Tag Info

Because the pronunciation was lost. "Wi" and "we" are still in some dialects, but standard Japanese does not have those sounds. These characters were just spelling. Similarly in English, we pronounce "through" as "thru" because the "gh" sound is long gone. After World War II there was a massive language overhaul, and they changed/standardized spelling and ...

The character in question was originally composed of 歯 (teeth) and 巳 (child). It represented children's teeth. This later became 齔 and 齓. 齔 is typically preferred over 齓, so I will use it below. It has two primary meanings: 1) in children, the replacement of old teeth with new teeth; 2) children of an age in which they are loosing their old teeth and growing ...

If I talk about the letters ゐ/ヰ and ゑ/ヱ, I would call them ワ行の「ゐ」 (pronounced as わぎょうのい) and ワ行の「ゑ」 (わぎょうのえ), or explain the letters in some way (昔の仮名の「ゐ」 and so on). I may or may not pronounce them as ウィ and ウェ, but I will probably try to avoid relying solely on pronunciation. The same also applies to を/ヲ. As David M. R. writes, 和文通話表 (the Japanese ...

Kanjigen lists 齔{シン} (U+9F54) together with 齓{シン} (U+9F53), and as far as I can tell the former is more common, though I'm not sure either are commonly used (I think 乳歯{にゅうし} might be much more common to mean "baby tooth"). It says it can refer to: (シンす) (verb/noun) The losing of teeth which occurs around the age of 7 or 8. Or, the teeth one has prior to ...

Update: I originally said these characters were obliterated from the language. I was wrong about that, as shown in the accompanying picture. As you can see in the picture above, the character does pop up now and again. I've probably passed by this place in Shinjuku countless times, but never took notice of it until recently when this question had the ...

Since there is no way to unambiguously pronounce these letters in modern Japanese, as Dave M G explains in his answer, I'd name them with: わうぃうぅうぇうぉ の うぃ/うぇ 「ヰタ・セクスアリス」[1] のヰ (いたせくすありす の い / うぃたせくすありす の うぃ) ニッカウヰスキー [2] のヰ (にっかうぃすきーの い/うぃ) ヱビスビール [3] のヱ (えびすびーる の え / いぇびすびーる の いぇ[4]) Incidentally, I would name "を" as "難しい方の「を」", or "わをんの「を」". And ...

Although as Dave M G already explained these characters do not have an independent pronounciation anymore, when spelling something through a telephone, they can be explained as "かぎのあるヱ" and "ゐどのヰ". (Source: Wikipedia ゑ and Wikipedia ゐ) You can also refer to them by their position in one of the ordering systems of the Japanese syllables. (ゑ is 第46位 in the ...

The English Wikipedia article on Kana suggests that there has never been a "wu" sound in Japanese. There are no kana for Ye, Yi or Wu, as corresponding syllables do not occur in Japanese natively[.] The Japanese Wikipedia article on the sound that would be "wu" confirms this. 日本語では「[w]」の子音と「[u]」の母音は共に/u/であるため、「う」の発音と同じになり、「う」と区別されない。 Because ...

It seems like there's a continuing series over here. :) If you collects some of my answers since the beginning of the beta, you can get a partial answer to your question, but that's not a full answer to your question, and frankly, a full explanation would require explaining the entire pronunciation system of the historical kana usage (歴史的仮名遣い), as it is ...

As @ZhenLin said in the comments, there are three particles left unchanged in the reform of the usage of kana: は　へ　を. They are left unchanged because they are so widely used, and changing them would result in too much in the writing form. I quote from a book*(I don't know the book, so the contents are in fact from wiki): ...

While the ゐ and ゑ characters were indeed eliminated from common use, there never was a WU character, at least not officially. The wikipedia page linked by Amanda mentions attempts to create a proper equivalent to the other わ行 letters just for the sake of completeness, but this letter (which looked like 于 in katakana but apparently had no hiragana equivalent) ...