Hiragana

Type(s): Syllabary

Description
- Hiragana is used to write the grammatical parts of sentences, especially inflections, where the Chinese characters are used to write the word stem, and the inflected ending is then added in hiragana. The characters themselves are derived from Chinese characters, through extraction of part of the Chinese character. The current collection of 46 characters was fixed by a regulation from the Ministry of Education in 1900. The hiragana (and katakana) characters that were rejected in this reform are today known as hentaigana.
In use
- 1200 -
Number of characters
- 46

Article
- http://okayama.cool.ne.jp/monjo/hentaigana.htm - Scope: Japanese
- http://www.omniglot.com/writing/japanese.htm
Site about
- http://members.aol.com/writejapan/
Tutorial
- http://www.zompist.com/flash.html

Object id: 647
Item identifier(s):
[file:/apps/ontopia.net/tomcat/ontopia-5.3.0/topicmaps/i18n.ltm#hiragana]