You don’t need ’em, as you correctly stated they’re obsolete and no longer needed, which is why you don’t really need to bother.
They were abandoned because they represented obsolete sounds. Japanese lost /we/ and /wi/ sometime after the invention of kana, merging with /e/ and /i/, in the same vein as を wo. Wikipedia has a pretty decent article about [historical kana usage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_kana_orthography). There weren’t major reforms until after WW2.
They weren’t really needed. At best, they were used to show a demi-vowel shift between two regular vowels, like how if you go from U to E quickly, you get a bit of W, or how a Y slips in between I and E. Since the sounds happened anyway, there wasn’t much point to making a deal of it when the WI/We and YI/Ye syllables couldn’t happen on their own.
The fact that they could be either Y or W as the situation required was a point of confusion, as well as the reason why the late Senator Inouye from Hawaii spelled his name the way he did. Whoever decided on the romanization of 井上 during the immigration process just went by the kana notation without noting the actual pronunciation.
So yeah, they were among the first things to be cut during the written language reforms. They lasted into the Taisho period within given names and surnames, and can still be seen in certain company names that date back to the Meiji or Taisho, e.g. Yebisu Beer, Nikka Wisuki (Whiskey), or Maruwi Gas. Their sibling を only survived because it had a grammatical use outside its pronunciation, though otherwise it was also dropped. So names like Hideo or Mitsuo are no longer written with a を at the end in kana.
I am a new Japanese learner as well and this is really cool! I always wondered why there were blank spots on the hiragana chart
ゑびす・ヱビス
the place and the beer
that’s the only use i’ve seen for the WE kana
i saw one shrine in kyoto with ゑ in the name, too, but that’s about it
ゐ・ヰ i don’t think i’ve ever seen outside a kana chart
5 comments
You don’t need ’em, as you correctly stated they’re obsolete and no longer needed, which is why you don’t really need to bother.
They were abandoned because they represented obsolete sounds. Japanese lost /we/ and /wi/ sometime after the invention of kana, merging with /e/ and /i/, in the same vein as を wo. Wikipedia has a pretty decent article about [historical kana usage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_kana_orthography). There weren’t major reforms until after WW2.
They weren’t really needed. At best, they were used to show a demi-vowel shift between two regular vowels, like how if you go from U to E quickly, you get a bit of W, or how a Y slips in between I and E. Since the sounds happened anyway, there wasn’t much point to making a deal of it when the WI/We and YI/Ye syllables couldn’t happen on their own.
The fact that they could be either Y or W as the situation required was a point of confusion, as well as the reason why the late Senator Inouye from Hawaii spelled his name the way he did. Whoever decided on the romanization of 井上 during the immigration process just went by the kana notation without noting the actual pronunciation.
So yeah, they were among the first things to be cut during the written language reforms. They lasted into the Taisho period within given names and surnames, and can still be seen in certain company names that date back to the Meiji or Taisho, e.g. Yebisu Beer, Nikka Wisuki (Whiskey), or Maruwi Gas. Their sibling を only survived because it had a grammatical use outside its pronunciation, though otherwise it was also dropped. So names like Hideo or Mitsuo are no longer written with a を at the end in kana.
I am a new Japanese learner as well and this is really cool! I always wondered why there were blank spots on the hiragana chart
ゑびす・ヱビス
the place and the beer
that’s the only use i’ve seen for the WE kana
i saw one shrine in kyoto with ゑ in the name, too, but that’s about it
ゐ・ヰ i don’t think i’ve ever seen outside a kana chart