Furigana
Furigana ( Japanese 振 り 仮 名 ) are a Japanese reading aid. These are hiragana or katakana characters that are written in Japanese next to a kanji or other characters to indicate its pronunciation. Above all, they stand next to rarer Kanji that the reader may not know or might have forgotten, but are also used as a reading aid for literature that is primarily aimed at children. In horizontally written texts, the furigana characters are usually above the Kanji, in vertically written texts they are to the right of the Kanji.
An example:
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In this example, the word kanji is written in Kanji as 漢字 and is explained by the Hiragana か ん じ .
They are also used to reproduce non-standard pronunciation, e.g. B. the Furigana ブ ル ー ( burū ), the Japanese pronunciation of English blue , for the character 青 , which would normally be read as ao (i) without this reference . Furigana also shows the difference between the spoken word and the intended meaning. For example, in a science fiction novel the earth is written as usual as 地球 (regular pronunciation: chikyū ), but the furigana ふ る さ と , furusato , are used as pronunciation , which actually mean “home”. The implication then is that the characters say “home” and mean “earth”.
In XHTML , Furigana characters can be represented using Ruby markup , but not all web browsers support this construction. Example:
Also Unicode provides a number of control codes for such comments .
See also
Web links
- www.furiganizer.com is a reading aid for Japanese text. The Furiganizer automatically adds furigana to any type of Japanese text, offers access to the EDICT lexicon and interactively learns which Kanji a user already knows. Furiganized text can be printed out or exported to Microsoft Word.