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In the last century, the ゐ and ゑ characters were eliminated from common use. But it seems like there used to also be a "wu" character that has since been lost. Given that it's a lot harder to find information about "wu", I assume it vanished much earlier.

Around when did the pronunciation and written character for "wu" drop out of use?

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2 Answers 2

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The English Wikipedia article on Kana suggests that there has never been a "wu" sound in Japanese.

There are no kana for Ye, Yi or Wu, as corresponding syllables do not occur in Japanese natively[.]

The Japanese Wikipedia article on the sound that would be "wu" confirms this.


Because in Japanese the consonant "w" and the vowel "u" both share the /u/ sound, "wu" becomes the same pronunciation as "u" and the two sounds cannot be distinguished.

This page gives information on why there is a kana for "wu" (于).


Because of the "Fifty Sounds" view that was ascendant in Japanese language teaching at the beginning of the Meiji period, apparently some textbooks even forced kana on yi, ye, and wu, as you can see in figure 2.

The Japanese Wikipedia pages on ye and yi seem to give more information.

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I was looking at the Japanese Wiki page earlier (though I had less success in understanding it), and on the table under 五十音図 there are characters where "wu", "ye", and "yi" would be. Any ideas what those are? –  Troyen Jun 6 '11 at 5:27
Those are just the kana for u, e, and i. –  Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Jun 6 '11 at 5:33
@Troyen Added some information about the kana for wu, ye, and yi. –  Amanda S Jun 6 '11 at 5:56
That character "于" you copied is kanji, not kana, IMHO. –  YOU Jun 6 '11 at 6:05
@YOU Since wu, ye, and yi are not actual Japanese syllables, they are not represented in most fonts. 于 seems to be used in the Wikipedia article because it closely resembles the ersatz wu character. –  Amanda S Jun 6 '11 at 6:19

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.

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Actually, wu did have a hiragara equivalent; it looked like a ほ with a 于 replacing the right side (according to the Japanese Wikipedia article). –  Amanda S Jun 6 '11 at 15:28
@Amanda: if I understood the Japanese article correctly, it was an ad-hoc way to mark it. Anyway, I have to admit I've never seen either letter (the hiragana or katakana WU) and I've read quite a few texts that were written before the spelling reform. –  Boaz Yaniv Jun 6 '11 at 17:00
Another interesting thing about ye... The ん the end of a word is a back of the throat n sound (Uvular nasal ɴ). When making that sound and the moving to え, one naturally makes a y sound (j in IPA???) in the process. That's why 千円 is pronounced 'senyen.' –  Jeshii Jun 10 '11 at 20:18

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