Ha (
hiragana
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'' literally means "flowing" or "simple" kana ("simple" originally as contrast ...
: は,
katakana
is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived fr ...
: ハ) is one of the
Japanese kana
The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters (kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most pr ...
, each of which represent one
mora
Mora may refer to:
People
* Mora (surname)
Places Sweden
* Mora, Säter, Sweden
* Mora, Sweden, the seat of Mora Municipality
* Mora Municipality, Sweden
United States
* Mora, Louisiana, an unincorporated community
* Mora, Minnesota, a city
* M ...
. Both represent . They are also used as a grammatical particle (in such cases, they denote , including in the greeting "kon'nichiwa") and serve as the
topic marker of the sentence. は originates from 波 and ハ from 八.
In the Sakhalin dialect of the
Ainu language
Ainu (, ), or more precisely Hokkaido Ainu, is a language spoken by a few elderly members of the Ainu people on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. It is a member of the Ainu language family, itself considered a language family isolate ...
, the katakana ハ can be written as small ㇵ to represent a final h sound after an ''a'' sound (アㇵ ''ah''). This, along with other extended katakana, was developed by Japanese linguists to represent sounds in Ainu not present in standard Japanese katakana.
When used as a particle, は is pronounced as わ
a は is also pronounced as わ in some words (e.g. もののあはれ pronounced as ''
mono no aware'').
Stroke order
The Hiragana は is made with three
strokes:
#A vertical line on the left side with a small curve.
#A horizontal stroke near the center.
#A vertical stroke on the right at the center of the second stroke followed by a loop near the end.
The Katakana ハ is made with two strokes:
#A straight stroke from the top pointing towards the bottom left.
#Another straight stroke going the opposite way, i.e. from the top to the bottom right
The hiragana は is read as "wa" when it represents a particle.
Other communicative representations
* Full Braille representation
*
Computer encodings
See also
*
Japanese grammar
References
Specific kana
[{{Cite web, url=https://nihongoichiban.com/2011/10/03/paticle-%E3%81%AF-wa/, title=Particle は (wa), last=Soergel, first=Nicolas, date=3 October 2011, website=Nihongo Ichiban]