Hiragana table
A table of the hiragana ( "hiragana") is called "gozyûonzu", which means a fiftysound chart. It
contains all the hiragana except ones with voiced sound marks, ones with semivoiced sound marks, and small hiragana (/ Q / and
double hiragana). Since Japanese characters are ordinarily written vertically from top to bottom, the table items are written in that
way. The lines are written from right to left.
Each hiragana is shown with its Romanization, and it is linked to audio files.
wa ra ya ma ha na ta sa ka a
a
n*3 wa ra ya ma ha*1 na ta sa ka a
i
i*2 ri mi hi ni ti si ki i
(chi) (shi)
u
ru yu mu hu nu tu su ku u
(fu) (tsu)
e
e*2 re me he*1 ne te se ke e
o
o*1 ro yo mo ho no to so ko o
*1 There are special singlekana words with these kana.
*2 These two kana are not used in modern Japanese.
*3 This kana actually doesn't contain the vowel "a".
This is an additional table that contains hiragana with voiced sound marks and semivoiced sound marks:
pa ba da za ga
a
pa ba da za ga
i
pi bi zi zi gi
(ji) (ji)
u
pu bu zu zu gu
e
pe be de ze ge
o
po bo do zo go
Voiced sound marks and semivoiced sound marks have no effect on the order of characters in dictionaries. So , , and
have the same order. Small hiragana also have the same order as ordinary ones. So and have the same order.
As you know, some of the hiragana have different pronunciations from what you might expect them to have. You may think the
vowel "i" works almost like "yi". Linguists call it palatalization. That's why "si" is like "shi" and "ti" is like "chi".
The order of kana came from Devanagari, which is a phonetic alphabet used for Indian languages such as Sanskrit and Hindi.
Devanagari's vowel order is: a, â, i, î, u, û, r, e, ê, o, ô. Its consonant order is from the back of the tongue to the lips: velars (k, g,
ng), palatals (ch, j, ny), retroflexes (.t, .d, .n), alveolars (t, d, n), bilabials (p, b, m), semivowels (y, r, w), and fricatives (sh, s, h).
Japanese doesn't have retroflexes, and the consonant of the syllables now represented by "h" + vowels was "p". In addition, some
linguists think the consonant of the syllables now represented by "s" + vowels was "ch". (Other linguists think it was either "ts" or
"sh".) Devanagari's consonant order thus gives the Japanese consonant order: k, ch (later s), t, n, p (later h), m, y, r, and w.
Copyright(C) TAKASUGI Shinji (ts@sf.airnet.ne.jp)