hi guys! so recently a song ive been interested in came out with the lyrics and i am hardcore struggling with one of the characters, i just dont know what it is. its not a kanji from what i have been able to find. admittedly i am still very much a beginner so any help is appreciated! the character is ゑ
if it helps, the line was:
ごやのすゑなぞながされ
exactly like ive written above. i cant find anything on it anywhere! and i dont know how it was pronounced, i copied and pasted it from a dictionary where i was able to find the character but there was no information on it.
6 comments
It’s the hiragana for “we”. It’s obsolete nowadays (usually replaced by え or ウェ ), but sometimes people use it for literary purposes
More typically, the line in question would be written as 五夜の末、何ぞ流され, so すゑ is just a pre-reform version of [末](#fg “すえ”).
>i copied and pasted it from a dictionary where i was able to find the character but there was no information on it.
For next time, [jisho.org](https://jisho.org) is a handy site:
[https://jisho.org/search/ゑ](https://jisho.org/search/%E3%82%91)
This is the hiragana character for “we”. If you’re wondering why you weren’t taught it when you started out, the short answer is that after WWII, the Japanese government standardized the written language to bring it closer in line with the spoken language. As part of that, this hiragana (alongside ゐ “wi”) was rendered obsolete, as pretty much all instances where it was used were changed to え which better reflects how it’s actually pronounced in practice.
ヱビス
That first one is the Katakana version of WE.ゑ，ヱ，
ヱビス is the name of a beer in Japan. And in the wonderful world of gotcha, it is romanized as Yebisu, not Webisu, because written Japanese hates us all.
Dude, if you put this character into google, literally the first result is wikipedia with all information you wanted