Gojūon

In the Japanese language, the is a traditional system ordering kana characters by their component phonemes, roughly analogous to alphabetical order. The "fifty" () in its name refers to the 5×10 grid in which the characters are displayed. Each kana, which may be a hiragana or katakana character, corresponds to one sound in Japanese. As depicted at the right using hiragana characters, the sequence begins with , , , , , then continues with , , , , , and so on and so forth for a total of ten rows of five columns.

Although nominally containing 50 characters, the grid is not completely filled, and, further, there is an extra character added outside the grid at the end: with 5 gaps and 1 extra character, the current number of distinct kana in a moraic chart in modern Japanese is therefore 46. Some of these gaps have always existed as gaps in sound: there was no or even in Old Japanese, with the kana for and doubling up for those phantom values. persisted long enough for kana to be developed for it, but disappeared in Early Middle Japanese, having merged with . Much later, with the spelling reforms after World War II, the kana for and were replaced with and , the sounds they had merged with. The kana for moraic (hiragana ) is not part of the grid, as it was introduced long after the ordering was devised. (Previously (hiragana ) was used for this sound.)

The contains all the basic kana, but it does not include:

• versions of kana with a such as or , or kana with such as or ,
• smaller kana (), such as the () or in the (, , ).

The order is the prevalent system for collating Japanese in Japan. For example, dictionaries are ordered using this method. Other systems used are the ordering, and, for kanji, the radical ordering.

History

The arrangement is thought to have been influenced by both the Siddhaṃ script used for writing Sanskrit and the Chinese system.

The monk Kūkai introduced the Siddhaṃ script to Japan in 806 on his return from China. Belonging to the Brahmic family of scripts, the Sanskrit ordering of letters was used for it. Buddhist monks who invented katakana chose to use the word order of Sanskrit and Siddham, since important Buddhist writings were written with those alphabets.

In an unusual set of events, although it uses Sanskrit organization (grid, with order of consonants and vowels), it also uses the Chinese order of writing (in columns, right-to-left).

The order of consonants and vowels, and the grid layout, originates in Sanskrit (, Hindu phonetics and phonology), and Brahmi script, as reflected throughout the Brahmic family of scripts. Specifically, the consonants are ordered from the back to the front of the mouth (velar to labial).

The Sanskrit was written left-to-right, with vowels changing in rows, not columns; writing the grid vertically follows Chinese writing convention.

Discrepancies

There are three ways in which the grid does not exactly accord with Sanskrit ordering of Modern Japanese; that is because the grid is based on Old Japanese, and some sounds have changed in the interim.

s /

What is now s / was previously pronounced either or , hence its location corresponding to Sanskrit ; in Sanskrit appears towards the end of the list.

h /

Kana starting with h (e.g. ), b (e.g. ) and p (e.g. ) are placed where p/b are in Sanskrit (in Sanskrit, h is at the end) and the diacritics do not follow the usual pattern: p/b (as in Sanskrit) is the usual unvoiced/voiced pattern, and has different articulation. This is because was previously , and pronouncing as is recent.

(More detail at Old Japanese: Consonants; in brief: prior to Old Japanese, modern was presumably , as in Ryukyuan languages. Proto-Japanese is believed to have split into Old Japanese and the Ryukyuan languages in the Yamato period (250–710). In Old Japanese (from 9th century) and on to the 17th century, was pronounced . The earliest evidence was from 842, by the monk Ennin, writing in the Zaitōki that Sanskrit is more labial than Japanese. The Portuguese later transcribed the -row as fa/fi/fu/fe/fo.)

/

Moraic was not present in Old Japanese (it developed following Chinese borrowings), does not fit with other characters due to having no vowel, and thus is attached at the end of the grid, as in Sanskrit treatment of miscellaneous characters.

Examples

The earliest example of a -style layout dates from a manuscript known as dated –1028. In contrast, the earliest example of the alternative ordering is from the 1079 text .

ordering was first used for a dictionary in the 1484 ; following this use, and were both used for a time, but today is more prevalent.

Today the system forms the basis of input methods for Japanese mobile phones – each key corresponds to a column in the , while the number of presses determines the row. For example, the '2' button corresponds to the -column (, , , , ), and the button is pressed repeatedly to get the intended kana.

Table

In each entry, the top entry is the hiragana, the second entry is the corresponding katakana, the third entry is the Hepburn romanization of the kana, and the fourth entry is the pronunciation written in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Please see Japanese phonology for more details on the individual sounds.

1. ^ These kana are no longer in common use, and are normally replaced with the plain vowel kana () in Japanese publications; however, that has not been done here to avoid ambiguity. and kana were included in the 1900 standard for kana but removed by subsequent orthographic reforms. Kana for writing explicit , and sounds were given by some nineteenth century textbooks but were not included in the 1900 standard. Since and existed as different phonemes in Old Japanese literature (having since merged), some specialised scholarly works use / (from the character ) to transcribe and / (from , where is the modern katakana ) to transcribe . To avoid confusion with the modern use of the character, is also sometimes distinguished as , to make it explicitly clear that it stands for .

The rows are referred to as , and the columns as . They are named for their first entry, thus the rows are (top to bottom) while the columns are (right to left) . These are sometimes written in katakana, such as , and conspicuously used when referring to Japanese verb conjugation – for example, the verb is of type.

Kana classes

Meiji writers, including grammarians and phonologists, often grouped kana into classes. The word they used was , but their descriptions were based largely on Japanese orthography and the organization of the table:

• : the five kana of the of the table, namely , , , , . Since these kana represented vowels, this term came to mean "vowel" in Japanese, and is now pronounced instead. Also known as .
• : these are actual sounds, the consonants of Japanese. Since they were impossible to write with kana, some writers tentatively used the kana of the , namely , , , , , , , to represent them. This term is no longer in use.
• : all the kana of the table except the . The popular phonological analysis was that were combined with to create . This term came to mean "consonant", and is now pronounced instead.
• : all the kana of the table, spelt without the or . Collectively, and . The concept of "clearness" comes from Middle Chinese phonology (see ), in which it meant "voiceless consonant", although the consonants (), (), (), () and () are better described with the term below.
• : all the kana spelt with the , such as , , , . The concept of "muddiness" comes from Middle Chinese phonology, in which it meant "voiced consonant". These were considered part of derived , and not part of the table.
• : the kana of the , spelt with the , namely , , , , . The is not part of the table either. Some writers also called them (, ), although this meant "aspirated consonant" in Middle Chinese phonology. Phonologically speaking, the consonant is more accurately described with the term above.
• : kana used to spelt consonant-vowel sequences. Collectively, , and .
• : the small kana (historically represented by the full-sized kana and ), used to represent the moraic obstruent . Dictionaries lists as a synonym, suggesting its origin in Middle Chinese phonology, where refers to a checked tone, or a syllable ending in an unreleased plosive consonant (see ).
• : the kana , used to represent the moraic nasal .
• : collectively, , , and .
• : kana digraphs, consisting of a and a small kana, such as or , although in historical kana orthography, small kana were simply as well.

Ordering of variant kana

In the ordering based on the , smaller versions of kana are treated in the same way as full-size versions:

• The , the small kana , is ordered at the same position as the large . When the words are otherwise identical, it goes after them. For example,
• :
• sounds are ordered in the same positions as the full-sized sounds. When the words are otherwise identical, they collate after them. For example,
• : .

Voiced versions (those with a ) are classified under their unvoiced versions; If the words are otherwise identical, the voiced version is placed after the unvoiced; are placed after . For example,

and

Mnemonics

To remember the , various mnemonics have been devised. For example,

Ah, Kana Signs: Take Note How Many You Read Well.

The first letters in such phrases give the ordering of the non-voiced initial sounds.

For vowel ordering, the vowel sounds in the following English phrase may be used as a mnemonic:

Ah, we soon get old.

The vowel sounds in the English words approximate the Japanese vowels: , , , , .

References

Bibliography

• "The Japanese language", Roy Andrew Miller, , describes the origin of gojÅ«on in Sanskrit.
• Gendai Kokugo Reikai Jiten, , used to obtain examples of dictionary ordering.

External links

• sci.lang.japan FAQ on the origin of kana order contains the relevant quote from the above reference.
• Kana Table (PDF)