Hiragana table

4.2. Hiragana table

A table of the hiraganas is called

/gozyuu o'nzu/, which means a fifty-sound chart in Japanese. It contains all the hiraganas except for ones with voiced sound marks, ones with semi-voiced sound marks, and small hiraganas (/Q/ and double hiraganas). 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 pronunciation, which may be different from its phoneme.

n	wa	ra	ya	ma	ha	na	ta	sa	ka	a
n	wa	ra	ya	ma	ha^*1	na	ta	sa	ka	a	a
	i^*2	ri		mi	hyi	nyi	chi	shi	ki	i	i
		ru	yu	mu	fu	nu	tsu	su	ku	u	u
	e^*2	re		me	he^*1	ne	te	se	ke	e	e
	o^*1	ro	yo	mo	ho	no	to	so	ko	o	o

*1: There are special single-syllable words with these kanas.
*2: These two kanas are not used in modern Japanese.

This is an additional table that contains hiraganas with voiced sound marks and semi-voiced sound marks:

pa	ba	da	za	ga
pa	ba	da	dza	ga	a
pi	bi	ji	ji	gi	i
pu	bu	dzu	dzu	gu	u
pe	be	de	dze	ge	e
po	bo	do	dzo	go	o

Consonant groups are called

(/gyo'u/), which means lines in Japanese, and vowel groups are called

(/da'n/), which means columns. So the hiragana

(/si/) is the hiragana of

(/sa'gyou i'dan/ = /sa/ line, /i/ column). The hiragana

(/N/) is the only exception; it doesn't belong to a vowel column because it has no vowel.

Voiced sound marks and semi-voiced sound marks have no effect on the order of characters in dictionaries. So

, and

have the same order. Small hiraganas also have the same order as ordinary ones. So

and

have the same order.

As you know, some of the hiraganas 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/ becomes "shi", /ti/ becomes "chi", etc. In fact, the hiragana

/ki/ is pronounced like "kyi". I don't use the spelling "kyi" as its pronunciation because it is not so different from "ki".

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