We (kana)


We is an obsolete Japanese kana that is normally pronounced in current-day Japanese. The combination of ゑ or ヱ with dakuten were introduced to represent in the 19th and 20th centuries.
It is presumed that 'ゑ' represented, and that ゑ and え indicated different pronunciations until somewhere between the Kamakura and Taishō periods, when they both came to be pronounced as 'イェ', later shifting to the modern 'エ'. Along with the kana for, this was deemed obsolete in Japanese in 1946 and replaced with E and エ. It is now rare in everyday usage; in onomatopoeia or foreign words, the katakana form 'ウェ' is used, as in "ウェスト" for "west".
The still sees some modern-day usage as a stylistic variant of 'え/エ'. Ebisu is usually written as "えびす", but sometimes "ゑびす" like Kyoto Ebisu Shrine, and name of the beer Yebisu, which is actually pronounced "Ebisu". The Japanese title of the Rebuild of Evangelion series is Evangelion: New Theatrical Edition. VTuber Sakamata Chloe of Hololive Production uses Katakana ヱ in place of the pronounced エ. ヱ is sometimes written with a, ヹ, to represent a sound in foreign words; however, most IMEs lack a convenient way to write this, and the digraph ヴェ is far more common. The Meiji-era Classical Japanese version of the Bible renders Jehovah as ヱホバ, and ヱ is also used to transcribe any Hebrew name spelled with Je in English, such as Jephthah; the modern Japanese version, on the other hand, only uses エ, hence エホバ and エフタ.
ゑ is still used in several Okinawan orthographies for the mora. In the Ryūkyū University system, ゑ is also combined with a small ぃ, to represent the sound. ヱ is used in Ainu for.
In wāpuro rōmaji—that is, the string of letters used for input to produce ゑ or ヱ—the sequence is wye.

Stroke order

The ゑ is made with one stroke. It resembles a ru that continues with a double-humped n shape underneath.
The ヱ is made with three strokes:
  1. A horizontal line that hooks down and to the left.
  2. A vertical line, just grazing the end of the first stroke.
  3. A long horizontal line across the bottom.

Other communicative representations