How Well Do You Know Kana?

How many hiragana or katakana characters are there? When you first started learning to read and write Japanese, you surely found out about 46 characters per syllabary – however, chances are that you missed out on four special ones. They are not commonly used anymore, but do officially belong to the writing systems and you might stumble upon them sometime. The sounds in question are wi, which in hiragana is written as ゐ and in katakana ヰ, and we, which is represented, respectively, as ゑ and ヱ. However, with time these sounds shifted and came to be pronounced as i and e. For that reason, during the ortographic reforms of 1946, they were deemed obsolete and replaced with i (い・イ) and e (え・エ) in all contexts. Nevertheless, you can still see them not only in older texts, as some proper names feature them even now and they are also used in Okinawan and Ainu writings. For example, you usually write ‘whisky’ as ウイスキー, but it is sometimes stylised as ウヰスキー. ヱ, interestingly, can be found in the name of the anime movie Rebuild of Evangelion ヱヴァンゲリヲン新劇場版 Evangerion Shin Gekijōban, a retelling of the famous mecha series Neon Genesis Evangelion. You never know where you might find these four special characters, so stay on the lookout!

Written by AL