6 CHAPTER 1. THE SYNTAX
( )( )These tables seem to contain 48 syllables instead of 46, but the two
syllables ’wi’ and ’we’, ( / and / ) have not been in use since the
Japanese language was revised following shortly after the second world
war. They have been included here only for completeness, and in modern
Japanese do not appear in thesyllabariestable.
Transcribing these tables into western, and more specifically En-
glish, sounds, the table looks roughly as follows:
n wa ra ya ma ha na ta sa ka a
(wi) ri mi hi ni chi shi ki i
ru yu mu fu nu tsu su ku u
(we) re me he ne te se ke e
(w)o ro yo mo ho no to so ko oThese tables can be looked at in two ways. Firstly, as arrangments in
columns. When doing so, the first column (going right to left rather than
left to right) is called the –column, the second column the –column,
and so forth. We can also look at them as arrangements of rows, in which
case the first row is called the –row, the second one the –row, followed
by the –, – and –rows. Thus, the katakana symbol for instance can
be found on the –row of the –column.
As mentioned, some of these columns have ’voiced’ variants. Voic-
ing is a linguistic term used to indicate consonants that are pronounced
with air running past the vocal cords. In Japanese, the -, -, - and
–columns (ka, sa, ta and ha) can be given a special diacritic mark, called
’dakuten’ (
) to indicate they are voiced rather than plain, changing
theirpronunciation:
/ / / /
/ / / /
/ / / /
/ / / /
/ / / /Which is transcribed as: