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Kana Yi, Ye and Wu?

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Maxim Posthumus

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When I was diving into several languages' Wikipedias, I found something that surprised me a lot.

I found articles about Kana syllables Yi, Ye and Wu on Korean Wikipedia.

Links to them:
Yi,Ye,Wu

There are a big pictures of those characters - the Hiragana forms of Yi and Ye are old Hentaigana I and E, while Wu has only Katakana form (there is only Hiragana U).

Though I'm not sure about the origins of Katakana forms of these characters (Yi looks like inverted I, while Wu is very similar to the Kanji character "from" 于).

But the thing is - what exactly are those characters? Are they some modern coinage for transliterating foreign languages, or are they some very obsolete or dialectal syllables?

It is also very suspicious that only Korean Wikipedia has information on them.

I also found Katakana Yi and Ye in Mojikyo fonts, which probably means these characters really exist somewhere.

If ANYONE knows what exactly those syllables are, please help me. Those two letters really intrigued me.
 
I'm Japanese and I've never taught in schools about "yi", "ye" or "wu".
Generally, these are treated as "yi"="i", "ye"="e" and "wu"="u".
I think, about a thousand years or more ago, there seemed to exist the Kanas which stand for these, but it's an academic subject.
 
Is it just me or is that Korean?

イェ= ye
ウィ=wi
ウェ=we
I don't know if that's official, though. It's just what my keyboard tells me. D-ryukei is probably right.
 
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D-ryukei said:
I think, about a thousand years or more ago, there seemed to exist the Kanas which stand for these, but it's an academic subject.
Click to expand...

That's surely possible.

I'm really interested in East Asian Lingustics, so it's really a pity for me that there is such a little information about those characters. Nonetheless, I think Unicode should do some research and encode them (I wish I could make a proposal, but it is so damn impossible, you have to have contacts in governments and be perfect programmist).
 
I can't read Korean.

I can read most hiragana, some katakana, few kanji, but not Korean! I can hardly understand what I'm reading, though. ..です... ...火災... 私... what?
 
wi, we and wo exist in kana, but I don't think they're used anymore. Don't know about yi, ye or wu, though.
 
Ah, is that how it's done?

I remember being very confused because I learned all the katakana that are normally used nowadays, but then later realized I didn't have one for yi. Was left confused for the rest of the day. xD;
 
Kthleen said:
"Wo" (を) is an article.
Click to expand...

Yes, but it's pronounced "o" now, isn't it, and is only in hiragan? Not much difference between wo and o, though. But I don't know any words with "wi" or "we". I wonder why they made new kana for them. It's ウィ　(wi) nowadays. I haven't seen ヰ.
 
Oops, I said "wo" is an article. It's actually a particle.
Gaiasweatdrop.gif


Te-em said:
Yes, but it's pronounced "o" now, isn't it
Click to expand...
I guess. but it's apparently still considered in the "w" line. My dictionary also says "ome Japanese do pronounce it as 'wo', usually in very formal situations."

Te-em said:
and is only in hiragan?
Click to expand...
There's katakana ヲ. According to my dictionary, it's used in place of を in things like telegrams.

Te-em said:
But I don't know any words with "wi" or "we". I wonder why they made new kana for them. It's ウィ　(wi) nowadays. I haven't seen ヰ.
Click to expand...
If this is anything to go by, they're not new; they were old but "made obsolete" in 1946.
 
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ゐ ヰ wi
ゑ ヱ we
hiragana and it's katakana forms
 
OK, thats now really confusing!
I have seen a lot about (ゐ ヰ wi) and (ゑ ヱ we)

The posts on the korean wiki about ye, yi and wu are only jokes.
If you klick the picture of these kana you will see.

Somehow the we ---> (ゑ ヱ) can't be right because there is a japanese Beer
called "Yebisu" and the Name is written in katakana starting with ヱ!
Look at this picture!
http://www.japan-netz.de/images/stories/essen/yebisu.jpg
The katakana is at the bottom of the can ---> ヱビスビール

So I wondering, what is (ゑ ヱ) now, ye or we?
 
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^That's interesting. I looked it up and found this:

"Yebisu is notable in that its Japanese name includes the now-obsolete we kana (written in this name in katakana, we). This can lead to confusion when romanized, as the 'Y' is not pronounced. The Tokyo neighborhood of Ebisu was named for the beer, which was originally produced there, though the we kana was later dropped. The pronunciations of both 'Yebisu' and 'Ebisu' are the same."

I also found this:

"The Japanese syllables are commonly ranged in a table with five rows. The first column contains the sounds a, i, u, e, o (あいうえお) and the second ka, ki, ku, ke, ko (かきくけこ). One column has two conspicuous empty spaces: ya, yu, yo (やゆよ) being the only three characters. Reasonable people are perfectly happy to just let that go and accept that there are only three characters in that column.

I, however, am far from being a reasonable person, so long ago I tracked down the missing yi and ye (ゐ、ゑ). If you ask a Japanese person today about these characters they will simply tell you they make the i and e sounds. This comes from the fact that these characters fell out of use about one hundred years ago and today there are few people who can make the original sounds.

Good dictionaries will list older words with the new sounds, but also indicate the old sounds. This helps explain why the Japanese monetary unit is called en (えん) in Japan and yen (ゑん) in America. English still uses the name from when Perry pried Japan open to the world, but Japanese uses the current language."


So perhaps it's both, and it appears that it's pronounced the same as "e" either way.
 
This explains a lot. So the missing kana are sounds not used anymore. Just like words in English can change their spelling, too, after many years.

But I wonder why they added new katakana for ye　イェ, we　ウェ, and wi　ウィ to use in foreign words, when they could use the old ones. Maybe the new ones are easier, but to me kana combined with smaller kana looks more complicated than a single kana. I have no idea why creating new ones . . . unless these actually are easier to remember.
 
From my memory Wi, We, and maybe Wo, used to be Japanese letters, but aren't used any more, except for names.
 
を　wo is still used. It's the direct object particle.
 
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