U (kana)

U (hiragana: , katakana: ) is one of the Japanese , each of which represents one mora. In the modern Japanese system of alphabetical order, they occupy the third place in the modern system of collating kana. In the , they occupied the 24th position, between and . In the chart (ordered by columns, from right to left), lies in the first column (, "column A") and the third row (, "row U"). Both represent the sound . In the Ainu language, the small katakana represents a diphthong, and is written as w in the Latin alphabet.

Derivation

Both and originate, via man'yōgana, from the kanji (pronounced u and meaning space).

The katakana , which is an u with a dakuten ("voiced mark"), along with , was first used by the educator Fukuzawa Yukichi for transcribing English in 1860 in his English-Japanese dictionary, which featured such entries as (HÄ«vunu), (Venusu), (RÄ«varu), etc. It is intended to represent a voiced labiodental fricative in foreign languages, but the actual pronunciation by Japanese speakers may be closer to a voiced bilabial fricative (see ).

Variant forms

Scaled-down versions of the characters (, ) are used to create new morae that do not exist in the Japanese language, such as (tu). This convention is relatively new, and many older loanwords do not use it. For example, in the phrase Tutankhamun's cartouche, the recent loan cartouche uses the new phonetic technique, but the older loan Tutankhamun uses ツ (tsu) as an approximation:

<div style="text-align:center"><br /></div>

The character is also used, in its full-sized form, to lengthen "o" sounds. For example, the word 構想 is written in hiragana as (kousou), pronounced kōsō. In a few words the character (o) is used instead for morphological or historical reasons.

The character can take dakuten to form (vu), a sound foreign to the Japanese language and traditionally approximated by (bu).

In hentaigana a variant of is appeared that retains cursive Kanji 宇.

Stroke order

The hiragana is written in two strokes:

1. At the top of the character, a short diagonal crook: proceeding diagonally downwards from the left, then reversing direction and ending at the lower left.
2. A broad curving stroke: beginning at the left, rising slightly, then curving back and ending at the left.

The katakana is written in three strokes:

1. At the top of the character, a short vertical stroke, written from top to bottom.
2. A similar stroke, but lower and positioned at the left.
3. A broad angled stroke: beginning as a horizontal line written from left to right, then reversing direction and proceeding downwards from right to left as a curved diagonal. The horizontal line must touch both the other strokes. Apart from the short diagonal, the character is identical to .

Other communicative representations

Full Braille representation

Computer encodings

References