U+3091 Hiragana Letter We
U+3091 was added to Unicode in version 1.1 (1993). It belongs to the block
This character is a Other Letter and is mainly used in the Hiragana script.
The glyph is not a composition. It has a Wide East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as Left To Right and is not mirrored. In text U+3091 behaves as Ideographic regarding line breaks. It has type Other Letter for sentence and Other for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.
The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:
ゑ in hiragana, or ヱ in katakana, is a nearly obsolete Japanese kana. The combination of a W-column kana letter with "ゑ゙" in hiragana was introduced to represent [ve] in the 19th century and 20th century.
It is presumed that 'ゑ' represented [we] (listen), and that ゑ and え indicated different pronunciations until somewhere between the Kamakura period and the Taishō period, when they both came to be pronounced as 'イェ' [je] (listen), later shifting to the modern 'エ' [e]. Along with the kana for wi ('ゐ' in hiragana, 'ヰ' in katakana), this kana was deemed obsolete in Japanese in 1946 and replaced with え and エ. It is now rare in everyday usage; in onomatopoeia or foreign words, the katakana form 'ウェ' (U-[small-e]) is preferred, as in "ウェスト" for "west".
The kana still sees some modern-day usage. Ebisu is usually written as "えびす", but sometimes "ゑびす" like Kyōto Ebisu Shrine (京都ゑびす神社, Kyōto Webisu Jinja), and name of the beer Yebisu (ヱビス), which is actually pronounced "Ebisu". The Japanese title of the Rebuild of Evangelion series is Evangelion: New Theatrical Edition (ヱヴァンゲリヲン新劇場版, Wevangeriwon Shin Gekijōban). Katakana ヱ is sometimes written with a dakuten, ヹ, to represent a /ve/ sound in foreign words; however, most IMEs lack a convenient way to write this, and the combination ヴェ is far more common.
Hiragana ゑ is still used in several Okinawan orthographies for the syllable /we/. In the Ryūkyū University system, ゑ is also combined with a small ぃ (ゑぃ/ヱィ), to represent the sound /wi/. Katakana ヱ is used in Ainu for /we/.
Representations
System | Representation |
---|---|
Nº | 12433 |
UTF-8 | E3 82 91 |
UTF-16 | 30 91 |
UTF-32 | 00 00 30 91 |
URL-Quoted | %E3%82%91 |
HTML hex reference | ゑ |
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake | ã‚‘ |
Encoding: EUC-KR (hex bytes) | AA F1 |
Encoding: JIS0208 (hex bytes) | A4 F1 |
Adobe Glyph List | wehiragana |
digraph | we |
Elsewhere
Complete Record
Property | Value |
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1.1 (1993) | |
HIRAGANA LETTER WE | |
— | |
Hiragana | |
Other Letter | |
Hiragana | |
Left To Right | |
Not Reordered | |
None | |
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✘ | |
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✘ | |
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✘ | |
✔ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
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Any | |
✔ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✔ | |
✔ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
— | |
NA | |
Other | |
— | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
Yes | |
Yes | |
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|
Yes | |
Yes | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
Other Letter | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
Other | |
✘ | |
✔ | |
✔ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
✘ | |
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None | |
Wide | |
Not Applicable | |
— | |
No_Joining_Group | |
Non Joining | |
Ideographic | |
None | |
not a number | |
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U |