Japanese Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for students, teachers, and linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the Japanese language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Sorry for the trivial question, but I've just started learning Japanese and thought that I should know how to write my name in hiragana. My name is Harriet.
My first guesses were はリえた or はリえと. I tried putting it into some web applications: one gave me はありと (which seems like a strange way of doing it), and another gave me some kanji and the romaji 'Harietto' which I guess would be はりえっと (?)
What would be the correct way of writing the name 'Harriet'?
Try going to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_(name) and hitting the Japanese pages to see how other people named Harriet have their names written. It's usually ハリエット (english names are usually written in katakana) or はりえっと in hiragana.
By any modern conventions ハリエット would be the proper way to write it. Something like ハリエタ would be wrong because, first, words ending with consonants like t in this case frequently have a っ (small tsu) to give it that kind of hardness, and second, because words that end in t generally use ト rather than タ at the end. Using タ makes it sound more like it's from a Romance language or something (like how in Japanese it's サラダ and not サラド). ハリエト fails also on the first point. ハリート (if we make it katakana) doesn't really match at all. If we match the pronunciation it would be something like "Hareet."
Writing it in hiragana would never be done unless for some intended effect.
Several examples are also present here: http://eow.alc.co.jp/search?q=harriet&ref=sa
My name is also Harriet! :) I've been learning Japanese and travelling to Japan for about 10 years now - I've always used/been told that it's written ハリエット.
