Talk:Furigana

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When using Furigana to represent Kanji, Katakana is used to represent the Chinese pronounciation of the word and Hiragana is used to represent the Japanese pronounciation in the word.

• Only if you need to make such a distinction. In a dictionary that might be the case, but in ordinary prose, katakana would probably mean a kanji is being given a reading that it shouldn't have, like an English word or something. Bigpeteb

Japanese Kanji will have a Japanese pronounciation and one or more Chinese pronounciation, depending on the time period and localitiy of the Chinese character was introduced, e.g. Canton, Fujian, Beijin, etc. regions and pronounciations. Ocassionally, there may be regional dialectal pronounciation of a Kanji.

An example would be mountain, which can be pronounced as "San" as in Fuji-san or Mt. Fuji, or yama, which is the general usage of "mountains".

• Why are you putting all this information here? Just put it in the page itself! Bigpeteb

Is it true that one can use furigana to indicate, not puns exactly, but sarcasm or euphemism? e.g. writing "So-and-so is tired", but using the furigana to indicate that "drunk" is meant in place of "tired". —Charles P. ^(Mirv) 23:40, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

You certainly can, but I don't think it's common, and it's not what furigana is really for. Remember, furigana is pretty rare outside of published works intended for kids. — Gwalla | Talk 03:06, 1 May 2005 (UTC)

I would say that children's books contain more furigana, but it's perfectly normal to encounter some furigana in adult books.

--ToothingLummox 00:58, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

• I looked in this article, but could find no section detailing the more common uses of furigana (for kids, textbooks, etc.), so that's now added. Hope it's okay! Kirin 5 July 2005 15:21 (UTC)

[edit] Loss of small kana

Would it be worth mentioning that furigana sometimes doesn't make the normal distinction between "big" and "small" forms of kana such as つ and so on? Or is that getting too far into the realm of trivia? I've known people be very confused by seeing things like (random example) きやつか as a gloss for 却下. Haeleth 16:44, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

That's a good point. Old fashioned hiragana actually didn't make the distinction either, so まって was written like まつて and so on. I've got a pre-war comic somewhere written in the old kana. Please do add it how you think best. --DannyWilde 14:15, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

I've tried. It seemed to me to fit best with the stuff at the beginning on the appearance and choice of scripts, but at the same time I didn't want to add too much more above the TOC. Anyone who can think of a better arrangement, please don't hesitate to arrange it.

In the article I've written "often" rather than "sometimes". This is based on a quick examination of the various texts I have to hand that I could find furigana in: of eight in modern orthography, only two distinguish between large and small characters. My sample may well be skewed - in particular, I don't have any books aimed at young children - so please change this if it's misleading. Haeleth 23:20, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

I think it's more common on slightly older text. I suppose the basic reason for it is that they couldn't print the smaller characters very well. I added a note to the article to say that. Also I found some nice example pictures on DNP's web site, which I added. The article is a little messy at the moment, I think you had a good idea to tidy it up. --DannyWilde 02:53, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Why doesn't English...

We could do with something like this in English, e.g.

our software creates new paradigms in e-Solutions^{/ɪz ə ləʊd əv juːsləs dʒʌŋk/}

130.246.132.26 08:30, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] ruby

What's the difference between furigana and ruby characters? —Tamfang 19:44, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

I would say a ruby character is *any* character intended to help with the reading of *any* script (including latin characters), whereas furigana has a more narrow meaning - i.e. that of *kana* used to help with the reading Chinese characters. In other words, any furigana is also a ruby character, but not all ruby characters are also furigana. TomorrowTime 22:26, 27 November 2006 (UTC)