Back Hiragana ACE Hiragana Afrikaans هيراغانا Arabic هيراجانا ARZ Hiragana AST Hiraqana Azerbaijani Hiragana BCL Хірагана Byelorussian Хирагана Bulgarian Hiragana BJN
| Hiragana 平仮名 ひらがな | |
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| Script type | |
Time period | ~800 CE to the present |
| Direction | Vertical right-to-left, left-to-right  |
| Languages | Japanese, Hachijō and the Ryukyuan languages |
| Related scripts | |
Parent systems | |
Sister systems | Katakana, Hentaigana |
| ISO 15924 | |
| ISO 15924 | Hira (410), Hiragana |
| Unicode | |
Unicode alias | Hiragana |
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| Japanese writing |
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| Components |
| Uses |
| Transliteration |
Hiragana (平仮名, ひらがな, IPA: [çiɾaɡaꜜna, çiɾaɡana(ꜜ)]) is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana as well as kanji.
It is a phonetic lettering system. The word hiragana literally means "common" or "plain" kana (originally also "easy", as contrasted with kanji).[1][2][3]
Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems. With few exceptions, each mora in the Japanese language is represented by one character (or one digraph) in each system. This may be a vowel such as /a/ (hiragana あ); a consonant followed by a vowel such as /ka/ (か); or /N/ (ん), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English m, n or ng ([ŋ]) when syllable-final or like the nasal vowels of French, Portuguese or Polish. Because the characters of the kana do not represent single consonants (except in the case of the aforementioned ん), the kana are referred to as syllabic symbols and not alphabetic letters.[4]
Hiragana is used to write okurigana (kana suffixes following a kanji root, for example to inflect verbs and adjectives), various grammatical and function words including particles, and miscellaneous other native words for which there are no kanji or whose kanji form is obscure or too formal for the writing purpose.[5] Words that do have common kanji renditions may also sometimes be written instead in hiragana, according to an individual author's preference, for example to impart an informal feel. Hiragana is also used to write furigana, a reading aid that shows the pronunciation of kanji characters.
There are two main systems of ordering hiragana: the old-fashioned iroha ordering and the more prevalent gojūon ordering.
- ^ Dual 大辞林
「平」とは平凡な、やさしいという意で、当時普通に使用する文字体系であったことを意味する。 漢字は書簡文や重要な文章などを書く場合に用いる公的な文字であるのに対して、 平仮名は漢字の知識に乏しい人々などが用いる私的な性格のものであった。
Translation: 平 [the "hira" part of "hiragana"] means "ordinary, common" or "easy, simple" since at that time [the time that the name was given] it was a writing system for everyday use. While kanji was the official system used for letter-writing and important texts, hiragana was for personal use by people who had limited knowledge of kanji. - ^ "Japanese calligraphy". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2017-06-22.
- ^ 山田 健三 (Yamada Kenzō). "平安期神楽歌謡文献からみる「平仮名」の位置" [The Position of "Hiragana" As Seen from Kagura Song References of the Heian Period] (PDF) (in Japanese). p. 239. Retrieved 2022-04-18.
[「かたかな」の「かた」は単に「片方」という意味ではなく、本来あるべきものが欠落しているという評価形容語と解すべきことはよく知られているが（亀井孝1941）、(7)としてまとめた対立関係から考えると、「ひらがな」も同様に「かな」の「ひら」という評価位置に存在するものと考えられる。
本国語大辞典「ひらがな」の説明は「ひら」を「角のない、通俗平易の意」とし、また「ひら」を前部要素とする複合語の形態素説明で、多くの辞書は「ひら」に「たいら」という意味を認める。
しかし、辞書の意味説明が必ずしも原義説明を欲してはいないことを知りつつも、野暮を承知でいうならば、これは「ひら」の原義（中核的意味）説明としては適当ではない。「ひら」は、「枚」や擬態語「ひらひら」などと同根の情態言とでもいうべき形態素／ pira ／であり、その中核的意味は、物理的／精神的な「薄さ」を示し、「たいら」はそこからの派生義と思われる。となると、「ひらがな」に物理的「薄さ」（thinness）は当然求められないので、「ひら」とはより精神的な表現に傾き、「かたかな」同様、「かな」から見て、ワンランク下であることを示す、いささか差別的・蔑視的ニュアンスを含む表現であったということになる。
The "kata" in "katakana" does not mean just "one side", and it is well known (Takashi Kamei 1941) that it should be interpreted as a valuation epithet stating that something that should be there is missing, and considering the oppositional relationship summarized in figure (7), the word "hiragana" can be thought of in a valuation position as the "hira" kind of "kana".
The explanation of the term hiragana in the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten dictionary states that hira means "unangular, easy for common people", and descriptions of hira as a prefixing element in compounds as given in many dictionaries explain this hira as meaning "flat" (taira).
However, knowing that dictionary explanations of meaning do not always drive for the original senses, if we are to be brash, we might point out that this is not a fitting explanation of the original sense (core meaning) of hira. Hira is morpheme /pira/, cognate with words like 枚 (hira, "slip of paper, cloth, or something else flat") or ひらひら (hirahira, "flutteringly"), and the core meaning indicates physical or emotional "thinness", and taira ("flat") appears to be a derived meaning therefrom. As such, we naturally cannot get physical "thinness" from hiragana, so the hira leans more towards an emotional expression, and much like for katakana, from the perspective of kana, it indicates a lower relative ranking [relative to the kanji], and the expression contains a slight nuance of discrimination or contempt.
] - ^ Richard Bowring; Haruko Uryu Laurie (2004). An Introduction to Modern Japanese: Book 1. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. p. 9. ISBN 978-0521548878.
- ^ Liu, Xuexin (2009). "Japanese Simplification of Chinese Characters in Perspective". Southeast Review of Asian Studies. 31.