Ye (hiragana: , katakana: , sometimes distinguished as ) is a Japanese mora or a kana used to write it, no longer in standard use.
It is presumed that would have represented . In the 10th century, e and ye progressively merged into ye, and then during the Edo period the pronunciation changed from /je/ to /e/.
However, during the Meiji period, linguists almost unanimously agreed on the kana for yi, ye, and wu. and are thought to have never occurred as morae in Japanese, and was merged with and .
Japanese people separated e and ye in Man'yà Âgana, early Hiragana and early Katakana.
After that, e and ye merged into ye in the 10th century, before eventually evolving back to e.
In the Edo period and the Meiji period, some Japanese linguists tried to separate kana e and kana ye again. The shapes of characters differed with each linguist. ð and ð¡ were just two of many shapes.
They were phonetic symbols to fill in the blanks of the gojà «on table, but Japanese people did not separate them in normal writing.
These suggestions were not accepted.
The hiragana version is encoded as HIRAGANA LETTER ARCHAIC YE (with the normative alias of HENTAIGANA LETTER E-1) in the position U+1B001. The katakana version is encoded as KATAKANA LETTER ARCHAIC YE, in the position of U+1B121.