- U (kana)
Infobox_kana
Hiragana
Katakana
Transliteration = u
Hiragana Manyogana = 宇
Katakana Manyogana = 宇
Unicode = U+3045, U+30A6
Footnotes =う in
hiragana or ウ inkatakana (romanised "u") is one of the Japanesekana , each of which represents one mora. In the modern Japanese system ofalphabetical order , they occupy the third place in the modernGojūon (五十音) system of collating kana. In theIroha , they occupied the 24th position, betweenむ andゐ . In the Gojūon chart (ordered by columns, from right to left), う lies in the first column (あ行, "column A") and the third row (う段, "row U").. Both represent Audio-IPA|U (Japanese).ogg|/ɯ/The hiragana form with dakuten, ゔ, is almost never seen, since the sound doesn't occur in native Japanese words.
Derivation
Both う and ウ originate, via man'yōgana, from the
kanji (pronounced "u" and meaning "space ").Variant forms
Scaled-down versions of the characters (ぅ, ゥ) are used to create new morae that do not exist in the
Japanese language , such as トゥ (tu). This convention is relatively new, and many olderloanword s do not use it. For example, in the phrase "Tutankhamun 'scartouche ", the recent loan "cartouche" uses the new phonetic technique, but the older loan "Tutankhamun" uses ツ (tsu) as an approximation:
ツタンカーメンの カルトゥーシュThe character う is also used, in its full-sized form, to lengthen "o" sounds. For example, the word 構想 is written in hiragana as こうそう (kousou), pronounced "kōsō". In a few words the character お (o) is used instead for historical reasons.
The character ウ can take
dakuten to form ヴ (vu), a sound foreign to theJapanese language and traditionally approximated by ブ (bu).troke order
The hiragana う is written in two strokes:
# At the top of the character, a short diagonal crook: proceeding diagonally downwards from the left, then reversing direction and ending at the lower left.
# A broad curving stroke: beginning at the left, rising slightly, then curving back and ending at the left.
The katakana ウ is written in three strokes:
# At the top of the character, a short vertical stroke, written from top to bottom.
# A similar stroke, but lower and positioned at the left.
# A broad angled stroke: beginning as a horizontal line written from left to right, then reversing direction and proceeding downwards from right to left as a curved diagonal. The horizontal line must touch both the other strokes. Apart from the short diagonal, the character is identical to フ.Other communicative representations
* Braille: :
* Phonetic alphabet: 「上野のウ」 ("u" of "Ueno ")
* Morse code: ・・-
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