Comparing Hiragana and Indian alphabet !

B^HO-JI, how would one read it?

Its a pseudo consonant BO+H, BO consonant is easy to say.

[eg BO ku wa = I, in Japanese]

What Indian languages do is sprinkle another H.

[it sounds like H as well eg 1st H in Highway]

So this is like mixing of two consonants BO and HO in a way they produce 1 consonant [and not two] BHO.

I recognize this and many others, such schemes, in Indian alphabet to be  pseudo consonants. If we count all of them Indian alphabets will have almost as many consonants as Hiragana. [39]

[eg Indian vowels are degenerated a vs aa, and multiplication effects cause the number of vowels to swell to more than 20 ]

[Note also that Hiragana has 46 elements out of which some are vowels and others special elements such as wo and n]

I asked my brother in law, who didn’t know about what I have found, and he said there are 39 consonants. I thought he would say a different number because he might be thinking 51 = 56 – 5 or 45 = 56 – 11.

[depending on how one counts the vowels to be 5 or 11, why 11? a, aa, e, ei, o, ou etc basically conjugations of base-vowels have been defined.]

But he said 39 and turns out that matches with my number.

The Indian alphabet as written now is a slight more tricky because it does not fulfill the instruction in terms eg of English Vowels and Consonants mapping into it.

So we are just told 56 letters and 11 vowels, and there are symbols [matraa and falaa] and some extra letters or symbols, and letters-cut-into-two and put on L, R, T, B etc, actually we were never told systematically so I would say perhaps to all of that.

But I mapped Indian alphabet, by recognizing that h, wherever it could be found, is a pseudo-fication of consonants and there were already two sets of consonants which are merely one set of consonants if we recognize they are heavy and soft tones of the same consonant. eg Read Here what are locking in language, and one sees what are heavy and soft rendering of the same consonant, and one does the heavy from the soft by adding H.

But the (heavy) consonants are also counted as base consonants eg in Japanese Hiragana.

[one example of soft vs heavy, eg, in Japanese; ki vs gi, ka vs ga, ta vs da ].

Now we get it, “India” defined additional consonants by adding h, {ki, khi, gi, ghi … ta, tha , da, dha} and so on.

[so its actually ki and ta although gi and da, the first level of heavy consonants, are also taken as base consonants, lets think how small the alphabet was for the nomads, and why they were so incapable of what we are expressing now, so easily]

These additional ones, are actually pseudo or artificial consonants, compared to a canonical set. The Roman set of alphabet consonants can be called as canonical, as its minimized and sufficient.

So by this recognition Indian alphabet must have exact same number of consonants and vowels, as Japanese hiragana, if they would not it would be because of two reasons;

1. Indian Consonants have an internal vowel, a, not present in Hiragana [Japanese native alphabet]. This is also true in Katakana. [Japanese alphabet for imported phonetics or non native words]

That means 39 base consonants (of India), will be all said in a different way, which could not be accommodated by Hiragana or Katakana. So, I think this is just one vowel more, for Hiragana.

The Hiragana a is actually an abbreviated aa of Indian sound-base.

The other differences from Hiragana are how {hu, fu} are said the same way, but note that, in the alphabet itself {hu, bu, pu, fu} are a set of degenerated consonant and also so in Indian system. That means for hiragana these elements are simply similar and this fact reflects with the same symbol denoting the 4 elements, with small difference accommodated by a two stroke or a dot. But for Indianic system, the symbols may or may not be widely different.But the fact remains in Indianic system, some are simply heavy vs soft, and some are by way of usage taken to be quite different.

Once an alphabet is defined how a member applies it eg in a particular set up [lets say Kansai Vs Guma] is merely an exception. These are local variations.

Other differences; no L sound? Its rendered R. Younha Go (Korean origin playback singer of Japanese pop) sings yuki kala which is actually yuki kara [from the snow] Also it could be that some native Japanese speakers are capable of L. But I don’t know the reason, its just not formal.

Its because they (L, R) are internally similar. This is called alternation and present in Indian sounds, in abundance.

Another difference is 3 s; sh, s, ss and so on. Japanese has sh and s, and no Japanese consonants appear without any one of the five vowels, and this is very strict rule. In India, we might find more than 20 vowel rendering apart from internal vowel in all consonants.

Exceptions can be suitably studied without changing the actual alphabet system.

2. the 2nd reason could be how Indian alphabet system mixes its vowels and consonants. Sh+i = shi and Sh+a = sha but in Japanese shi is already the base consonant. In Indian system S is the base, vowel a is internal in S, vowel aa is explicit, saa is S+aa, in Japanese sa is already a base consonant, sa = saa in Japanese transLIT.

The thing to note is two fold;

i. Japanese collects all its possible sounds and forms base alphabet by 39+5+2+1 system. 39 consonants. 5 vowels, 2 symbols [1-dot and 2-strokes] 1 special sound n, which is nasal or not, depending on how its intended, eg nihongo, 1st n is not nasal, its exactly said as neutral, nara or nephew.

2nd n is specific to Asia, but don’t be so hard-mouthed. Check this native word out, Bimbo, King Kong, Comb, these are nasal n and m, which is why now “Indians” define different symbols to accommodate different nasal sounds by defining symbols for n and m separately.

These are accommodated in Indian alphabet system either by defining a half-part of original M or N letter or as a special symbol. In Hiragana simply a special letter. [n in Japanese looks like a dwarf-h with a tail].

It is immaterial since its simply a nasal sound and not n, m sound necessarily.

But Indians were bought out [British history] Japanese were perhaps not even approached. [pun intended]

ii. In Indian system vowel and base (consonants) are not combined as such but symbols are combined with base eg Shi would be base consonant sh + symbol i. whats the need of symbol? none. We already have a vowel called i. Also the i-i and e-i are written as additional vowel.

So there are actually 5 pseudo vowels and one internal vowel a. Which is why there are we say 11 vowels, but why I say India has more than 20 vowels, is the result of various other facts, I have described in this and other related articles.

So in all, total, actually Indian system can be mapped into 39+5+[all the symbols and special letters India created].

When we map into 39+5, we need two symbols and we can use the dot and 2-strokes of Japanese, remove some of the unnecessary letters, because we realize that ki and gi [and in case of India khi and ghi as well] can be written as the same letter with either dot, two strokes or both dot and double-stroke.

Just like Japanese is started with Ki [and Gi is a Ki with a double-stroke] and ha [and ba is a dot on ha].

We will probably miss only one or two sounds, if we are to have an unified sound-database of Japanese and Indian. They can be found out and dealt with properly.

That’s it, in alphabet also Japanese and Indian languages, are almost same, as same as one Indian language is to another. Inherently, linguistically congruent but usage and meaning etc can be mapped from one part of the unified language to another.

I had already found many particles of Japanese, as exactly same as that of Indian Languages and some words are exactly same.

I wrote this article because I just came from a Bhoji, [BO^HJI, note H can be sprinkled anywhere, preferably soon enough, not to change the sound]

A Bhoji is a community feast for celebration of something in today’s case a marriage.

There are some more additional differences between Japanese and Indian:

There is no L, but also there is no special-L in Japanese [usually found in Odia: phala = fruit is a special L for Odia. and perhaps Panjabi too, not even in Hindi and I do not know about Bengali. But certainly in Kannada].

There is a special N [as in gana-tantra: in perhaps all languages in India] but not in Japanese.

There is no special t and d and their derivative consonants in Japanese.

These special t, d are not found in Japanese but found in English and all Indian languages. The T is used in two ways one as found in Japanese {tori niku, tenki ga i desu? Tanaka} this way is used in all Indian languages, eg Hindi {Tapasya, tawayaf, tandoori, tapasya karne se tawayaf aur tandoori milta he}.

Now there is a T which is not found in Japanese but found in all languages of India and in English. English {Time, Tense, Tomato}, Hindi {Tarjan, Tattu, atta}

This case is also found with all derivative consonants such as D [2 ways in English, Indian. Hindi: Damini, Darshan or 2ndway: Dabba, Dalton, Dant = scolding. English: Therefore, this. 2nd way Dalton, Deputy ],

Tha [ 2ways this can be said, Hindi: paratha, maratha or matha, gatha. English: The T sound extends as Th sound if we stress it much like in the Indian way ]

This is also true for Dha. {Dhenkanal = my home town is a H-stressed De as in Deputy, so Dheputy. If we want to say it right, we try saying Ten, 10-canal and go on making ten really H-stressed }

I believe except for L [Hindi: phal, 1st L, Odia Phala, special-L] and N [gana-tantra, 1st n is special N, 2nd n is normal n, said in nasal way] difference cited in the paragraph above, the other differences might have come from British past; The T in Time, Tank and D in Dalton, Deputy etc.

Joke: The British must have taken the skin off Indian students to learn these special letters, not to make them white but to learn specialized consonants.

But all these are not to be found in Japanese, which was an imperial power itself.

So there is something called 2nd consonants and 2nd vowels in Indian alphabet. ll is a 2nd l, pp is a 2nd p and so on. But this is also found in Japanese Kippu = ticket. But anyway l is not found in Japanese so ll is not.

So all in all we can see how amazingly Japanese Hiragana and Indian alphabets fit, the only cases where they do not, it does not behoove on us scholars to change the rule of the consonants, and vowels but merely add these specialties where they belong; to their related base-consonant or vowel.

The chart is given in another recent article which was written in the last week about Hiragana mapping into Indou-gana.