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I'm trying to write the name of a Chinese friend, Ying. I know that the sounds "yi" and "ye" don't exist any more except for the deprecated hiragana characters, and katakana doesn't have either of them. The question, how should I write it?
A Japanese friend suggested イン, but this misses out two kinda important consonants from the word. Is there no better way of representing this name in katakana?
イン is pretty much the standard way to transliterate Chinese "ying" to kana. Here are some examples:
but this misses out two kinda important consonants from the word
A little on this. When a word ends in ん, that ん can take on the sound of [ŋ]. For example, if you listen to yuu0equal0u's recording of わんわん or panna's recording of たくさん on Forvo.
Often, the transliteration doesn't reproduce exactly the original pronunciation of the word. For example, スティーブ・ジョブズ sounds a bit different from how "Steve Jobs" is pronounced in English.
As to "yi", い・イ is definitely one way (although not the only way) of transliterating this sound. We can see this in the kun'yomi of some kanjis:
Yi (and other characters) existed in Japanese a long time ago and I found an old katakana sheet that has the missing characters. This image is from 1873:
More on this at this Japanese wikipedia page for: ヤ行イ. Also, note that this page has the respective hiragana characters too.
In reality, most native Japanese will not be able to read the "classical yi" or other classical characters.
There are contexts where the classical characters are still used, most notably Yebisu Beer; look at the katakana character after 琥珀:
http://www.moippai.com/beer-reviews/kohaku-yebisu-(amber-yebisu)-259.html
It looks like the katakana for "we"... which actually has me confused at the moment because I always thought it was "ye"...
Anyways! Although the beer is "Yebisu" in romaji and "Yebisu" (or "Webisu"?) in katakana, it is pronounced エビス.
To answer your question though you should probably go with イン as the others have suggested but if you really want to use the character for yi, it does it exist; just understand that most people will not be able to read it and, even if they can read it, they will still pronounce it イ.
以, which can be seen in words such as 以前, 以降, 以来, etc.
I agree that イン is probably the best fit for the limitations of Japanese. Of course, being Chinese, your friend already has a kanji for his/her name, so you could always just use that and write イン as furigana for it.
Alternatively -- and I don't know how much this would happen in real life -- you could just use a Japanese pronunciation for the name's kanji. If you've ever seen the movie Ip Man, the main character is the titular Chinese man. His name "Ip Man" (sometimes written "Yip Man") has the Chinese characters 葉問. In the movie, he is taken prisoner by Japanese military, and the Chinese/Japanese intermediary calls him ヨウ・モン, which you can see is the Japanese 音読み of those characters. So you could possibly do that, although I don't know if that's somehow disrespectful to change the pronunciation of the name.
If you look at the Hiragana chart below, you notice that there are no corresponding letters for "yi" and "ye". Those letters do not exist in Japanese (not that we can't pronounce it).
(From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana)
When we need to write foreign words containing "yi" and "ye", we use イ, and イエ (or sometimes イェ) respectively.
A good example is probably "yes". We write it イエス。Another one is "yay". This becomes イエイ。
𛀁 is the hiragana foe ye but is HUGELY obsolete and its katakana was the same for the katakana for the letter e (back then the e katakana was different think of the katakana ne ネ and it was similar to this expect it didn't have the 3rd and 4th stroke (the bottom and bottom right strokes))
