Re: Question about historical Japanese kana usage.

On Sun, 7 Nov 2004 19:31:07 +0100, Steven Williams <feurieaux@...> wrote:
> In the process of learning the hira- and katakana, I
> hit upon something that made me very curious indeed.
> There were kana for the syllables 'we', 'wi' and 'wo'
> (pronounced these days as 'o'; the other two have
> simply been replaced by 'e' and 'i'), but there's no
> kana for 'ye'. 'Ye' as a syllable existed in Japanese,
> as in the obsolete names 'Yedo' (now 'Edo') and 'yen'
> (now 'en').
>
> How did the Japanese express the syllable 'ye'? Or did
> they at all?
Not in kana, as "ye" disappeared from the language before hiragana and
katakana evolved:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/afaq/yeyi.html

"en" apparently used to be "wen", not "yen".  "Yen" is an artifact of
an old system of Romanization that spelled "e" initially as "ye" (and,
I suspect after vowels as well, as in the surname "Inouye").
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/afaq/yen.html


	*Muke!
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