À propos des syllabes "wu", "ye" et "yi".

Hello,


Voilà, pour tout ceux à qui ça énerve (ce qui n'est plus mon cas) de ne pas encore savoir trop quoi avec ces syllabes, voici enfin l'information que tout le monde recherche, une réponse claire et détaillée que j'ai trouvé via un lien ^^. (celui-ci > http://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/643/when-did-the-wu-character-drop-out-of-use/679#679 )

Pour l'instant, elle n'est pas encore traduite, elle est donc en anglais, mais en bref, le "wu" n'a jamais existé tout comme le "yi"; pour le "ye", c'est un petit peu plus compliqué, mais il n'existe plus maintenant (si je ne dis pas de bêtises), bref.


Le commentaire :

While the ゐ and ゑ characters were indeed eliminated from common use, there never was a WU character, at least not officially. The wikipedia page linked by Amanda mentions attempts to create a proper equivalent to the other わ行 letters just for the sake of completeness, but this letter (which looked like 于 in katakana but apparently had no hiragana equivalent) had never seen wide use.

The reason for that is that the sounds /wi/ and /we/ were indeed in existence in Japanese at some point of time, so they were naturally given their own letters - but there has never been any /wu/ sound (as well as any /yi/ sound) in Japanese, and thus it wasn't given any letter.

That's not to say such sounds are impossible: English has both sounds (/wu/ in would, /yi/ in year, which most Japanese speakers would pronounce the same as ear). It's just that Japanese never had them. /ye/ is a slightly different story: Japanese does have a distinct /ye/ sound now (written as イェ, though some people may pronounce it the same as イエ). And it also had a /ye/ sound back in the Edo period, but it was actually just the normal pronunciation of /e/ in the beginning of a word (which reverted back to /e/ in modern times). That's where some English spellings such as Yen, Yebisu and Yedo come from.

- - - -


Voilà!