Quote:
Originally Posted by ryuurui
Hiragana is a syllabary and it consists of a group of characters. Kanji are characters, too. I am not sure what do you mean by a "name". Hiragana characters do not mean anything, they simply represent sounds. So, as i said above, ひ is "hi", that is it.
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I'm 100% sure OP is thinking about how in English each letter has a name in addition to its sounds. For example, the sentence, "'Mom' begins with the letter 'm'" has us using the
name for "m," which sounds like "imm." This is the name of the letter. "ei, bee, see, dee, ef, jee, aitch, eye, jay, kay, ell, imm, inn, oh, pee, kyuu, arr, etc." Those are the pronunciations of the names of letters in English. Spanish is the same. For example, "y" is (well, was, until last year)
named "i griega," which can be translated into English as "Greek 'i.'" Obviously the name and sound are different! When saying the word "cayo," you say "cayo," not "caigriegao"!
I've never heard anyone refer to the names of kana, so I'm not sure the concept actually exists in Japanese. Even if there is a concept of the name of a kana, it is exactly like the pronunciation of the sound itself. So the "name" for ひ is ひ, and it pronounced exactly the same, to stretch a Western analogy into Japanese.