Hyphenation for 'hiragana'

Showing how to split the syllables of 'hiragana'.

Syllabification or syllabication is the separation of a word into syllables, whether spoken or written. The written separation is usually marked by a hyphen when using English orthography (e.g., syl-la-ble) and with a period when transcribing in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For presentation purposes, typographers may use an interpunct, or a special-purpose "hyphenation point".

At the end of a line, a word is separated in writing into parts conventionally called "syllables" if it does not fit and if moving it to the next line would make the first line much shorter than the others. This can be a particular problem with very long words. Word processing has automated the process of justification, making syllabification of shorter words often superfluous.

Hiragana (平仮名, ひらがな, IPA: [çiɾaɡaꜜna, çiɾaɡana(ꜜ)]) is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana as well as kanji. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word hiragana means "common" or "plain" kana (originally also "easy", as contrasted with kanji). Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems. With few exceptions, each mora in the Japanese language is represented by one character (or one digraph) in each system. This may be a vowel such as /a/ (hiragana あ); a consonant followed by a vowel such as /ka/ (か); or /N/ (ん), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context and dialect, sounds either like English m, n or ng ([ŋ]) when syllable-final or like the nasal vowels of French, Portuguese or Polish. Because the characters of the kana do not represent single consonants (except in the case of the aforementioned ん), the kana are referred to as syllabic symbols and not alphabetic letters. Hiragana is used to write okurigana (kana suffixes following a kanji root, for example to inflect verbs and adjectives), various grammatical and function words including particles, and miscellaneous other native words for which there are no kanji or whose kanji form is obscure or too formal for the writing purpose. Words that do have common kanji renditions may also sometimes be written instead in hiragana, according to an individual author's preference, for example to impart an informal feel. Hiragana is also used to write furigana, a reading aid that shows the pronunciation of kanji characters. There are two main systems of ordering hiragana: the old-fashioned iroha ordering and the more prevalent gojūon ordering.

Description above from the Wikipedia article "hiragana", licenced under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

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