I’m sure many of you will be familiar the the app named simply ‘Japanese’, as it seems a great reference. One thing is puzzling me however… Beneath all the kana diacritics and digraphs there is a section labelled ‘Other’, as below:
|ふぁ (fa) |ふぃ (fi) |ふぇ (fe)|ふぉ (fo)|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|うぁ (wa)|うぃ (wi)|うぇ (we)|うぉ (wo)|
|ゔぁ (va)|ゔぃ (vi)|ゔぇ (ve)|ゔぉ (vo)|
​
|ファ (fa) |フィ (fi) |フェ (fe)|フォ (fo)|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|ウァ (wa)|ウィ (wi)|ウェ (we)|ウォ (wo)|
|ヴァ (va)|ヴィ (vi)|ヴェ (ve)|ヴォ (vo)|
As these mainly represent non-native sounds they make sense in katakana, but I don’t really understand why they exist in hiragana. I haven’t seen them anywhere else either… Is there any practical use to knowing the above set of hiragana digraphs? Or is it is purely to achieve some symmetry with the two sets of kana within this particular app? Insights welcome!
2 comments
They’re literally the same though. If you know them in one set of kana you automatically know them in the other too, so I don’t really see what the hangup here is
And to answer your question, yes, both exist, and you mostly see the hiragana variants when writing loanwords in hiragana for effect. For example the title of the anime ふらいんぐうぃっち
Can’t say that I’ve ever seen ウァ・うぁ personally, because you’d just write that as ワ・わ, but apparently it’s a thing [among Japanese Latin scholars](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/9801/how-does-%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A1-differ-from-%E3%83%AF-and-%E3%83%B4%E3%82%A1)
From what I’ve seen over time (which for a while was *mostly* in music and fashion circles, to be transparent), sometimes loanwords are written in hiragana anyways just for style in *titles* and whatnot, especially a soft or cute one – like ぶるーべりー as opposed to ブルーベリー. I would imagine product packaging also sometimes does this, though I’m not looking at it on the regular to be certain.
So it might be pretty rare that you’d see these specific digraphs in hiragana, but it is *technically* possible. I wouldn’t say it’s worth drilling them or anything though, just keep the possibility in mind.