I know some Japanese people (dialects?) say “wo” instead of “o” in phrases like りんごを食べる. If you consider を to be in the わ row, does that mean that there are other “missing” sounds? わ, wi, wu, we, を (pronounced “wo”)? Were there ever sounds/letters for や, yi, ゆ, ye, よ?
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Have you tried here?
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Interesting! So, were “ye” “yi” and “wu” formerly pronounced as well as written? And were there also a “wi” and “we”?
You can still type ゐ (wi) and ゑ (we) in (most?) IMEs, though it can sometimes take a bit of scrolling - usually they want to write うぃ and うぇ instead.
Ebisu Beer is still written as ヱビス (that’s “we” in katakana).
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You’ll see the old kana around in some places. The first one that comes to mind is ヱビス beer.
You can also spot some of the old pronunciations in the way earlier Japanese immigrants spell their names. Inoue comes from ゐのうへ, for example, and I’ve seen a few variations on that name for sure.
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The recent Evangelion movies also use it.
ヱヴァンゲリヲン
The old logo actually looks like it used it, but I usually see it with エ if people are using a normal font.
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That is such an awesome-looking character. Now I’m sad that it fell out of use.
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it’s ru on a wave right. amazing.
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Surfin’ ru!
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Yeah, it’s like る is setting off on a little adventure on the sea ^^
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That’s so cute lmaooo
Ru is going to find itself, starting it’s journey surfin’ as @plantron said
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From what I heard, the reform was made to make the writing correspond to the pronunciation. So by that time at least it seems they weren’t pronounced as such.
Presumably they were once read as they’re written though. For instance the word 円 was originally read yen, which the outside world has kept saying even after the ye sound disappeared from japanese itself.
I’m sure somebody knows more though.
EDIT: as an example, before the reform, 読んでいた would have been written 読んでゐた, even though the pronunciation was the same as today.
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Personally I think it looks like a fancy fart coming out of a bottom
Which I am also happy to take as the sigil of my house
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