question: japanese characters in hiragana are the same yet different?
comment: The little character indicates a diphthong where the sounds are blended together. This alters the pronunciation and, as hiragana is a syllabary which represents the syllables or moras of words, the resulting meaning of the word.
passages: Hiragana is used to write "okurigana" (kana suffixes following a kanji root, for example to inflect verbs and adjectives), various grammatical and function words including particles, as well as miscellaneous other native words for which there are no kanji or whose kanji form is obscure or too formal for the writing purpose. Words that do have common kanji renditions may also sometimes be written instead in hiragana, according to an individual author's preference, for example to impart an informal feel. Hiragana is also used to write "furigana", a reading aid that shows the pronunciation of kanji characters.
   There is also some flexibility for words with more common "kanji" renditions to be instead written in hiragana, depending on the individual author's preference (all Japanese words "can" be spelled out entirely in hiragana or katakana, even when they are normally written using kanji). Some words are colloquially written in hiragana and writing them in kanji might give them a more formal tone, while hiragana may impart a softer or more emotional feeling. For example, the Japanese word "kawaii", the Japanese equivalent of "cute", can be written entirely in hiragana as in かわいい, or as the kanji term 可愛い.
   However, this does not apply when kanji are used phonetically to write words that do not relate directly to the meaning of the kanji (see also ateji). The Japanese word for 'lightning', for example, is "inazuma" (). The component means 'rice plant', is written in hiragana and is pronounced: "ina". The component means 'wife' and is pronounced "tsuma" (つま) when written in isolation—or frequently as "zuma" when it features after another syllable. Neither of these components have anything to do with 'lightning', but together they do when they compose the word for 'lightning'. In this case, the default spelling in hiragana rather than is used.
   The forms of the hiragana originate from the cursive script style of Chinese calligraphy. The figure below shows the derivation of hiragana from manyōgana via cursive script. The upper part shows the character in the regular script form, the center character in red shows the cursive script form of the character, and the bottom shows the equivalent hiragana. Note also that the cursive script forms are not strictly confined to those in the illustration.
   The Unicode hiragana block contains precomposed characters for all hiragana in the modern set, including small vowels and yōon kana for compound syllables, plus the archaic ゐ "wi" and ゑ "we" and the rare ゔ "vu"; the archaic 𛀁 "ye" is included in plane 1 at U+1B001 (see below). All combinations of hiragana with "dakuten" and "handakuten" used in modern Japanese are available as precomposed characters, and can also be produced by using a base hiragana followed by the combining dakuten and handakuten characters (U+3099 and U+309A, respectively). This method is used to add the diacritics to kana that are not normally used with them, for example applying the dakuten to a pure vowel or the handakuten to a kana not in the h-group.
   In the middle of words, the "g" sound (normally ) may turn into a velar nasal or velar fricative . An exception to this is numerals; 15 "jūgo" is considered to be one word, but is pronounced as if it was "jū" and "go" stacked end to end: .
  
  In many accents, the "j" and "z" sounds are pronounced as affricates ( and , respectively) at the beginning of utterances and fricatives in the middle of words. For example, "sūji" 'number', "zasshi" 'magazine'.
   In modern Japanese, the hiragana and katakana syllabaries each contain 46 basic characters, or 71 including diacritics. With one or two minor exceptions, each different sound in the Japanese language (that is, each different syllable, strictly each mora) corresponds to one character in each syllabary. Unlike kanji, these characters intrinsically represent sounds only; they convey meaning only as part of words. Hiragana and katakana characters also originally derive from Chinese characters, but they have been simplified and modified to such an extent that their origins are no longer visually obvious.
   There are two main systems of ordering hiragana: the old-fashioned iroha ordering and the more prevalent gojūon ordering.
  
  Section::::Writing system.
  
  The modern hiragana syllabary consists of 46 base characters:
  
  BULLET::::- 5 singular vowels
  
  BULLET::::- 40 consonant–vowel unions
  
  BULLET::::- 1 singular consonant
   Most with the "hiragana" syllabary, but "katakana" and "romaji" are also occasionally used. Alternatively, sometimes foreign words (usually English) are printed with furigana implying the meaning, and vice versa. Textbooks usually write on-readings with katakana and kun-readings with hiragana.
  
  Here is an example of the Bopomofo ruby characters for Beijing (""):
   There are two hiragana pronounced "ji" (じ and ぢ) and two hiragana pronounced "zu" (ず and づ), but to distinguish them, particularly when typing Japanese, sometimes "ぢ" is written as "di" and "づ" is written as "du". These pairs are not interchangeable. Usually, "ji" is written as じ and "zu" is written as ず. There are some exceptions. If the first two syllables of a word consist of one syllable without a "dakuten" and the same syllable with a "dakuten", the same hiragana is used to write the sounds. For example, "chijimeru" ('to boil down' or 'to shrink') is spelled ちぢめる and "tsuzuku" ('to continue') is . For compound words where the dakuten reflects "rendaku" voicing, the original hiragana is used. For example, "chi" ( 'blood') is spelled ち in plain hiragana. When "hana" ('nose') and "chi" ('blood') combine to make "hanaji" ( 'nose bleed'), the sound of changes from "chi" to "ji". So "hanaji" is spelled according to ち: the basic hiragana used to transcribe . Similarly, "tsukau" (; 'to use') is spelled in hiragana, so "kanazukai" (; 'kana use', or 'kana orthography') is spelled in hiragana.
   These basic characters can be modified in various ways. By adding a "dakuten" marker ( ゛), a voiceless consonant is turned into a voiced consonant: "k"→"g", "ts/s"→"z", "t"→"d", "h"→"b" and "ch"/"sh"→"j". For example, か ("ka") becomes が ("ga"). Hiragana beginning with an "h" can also add a "handakuten" marker ( ゜) changing the "h" to a "p". For example, は ("ha") becomes ぱ ("pa").
   The following table shows the method for writing each hiragana character. It is arranged in the traditional way, beginning top right and reading columns down. The numbers and arrows indicate the stroke order and direction respectively. br
  
  Section::::Unicode.
  
  Hiragana was added to the Unicode Standard in October, 1991 with the release of version 1.0.
  
  The Unicode block for Hiragana is U+3040–U+309F:
   Section::::Other suggested roots.
  
  English is taught in Japanese schools with an emphasis on writing and grammar over speaking. The written word is taught using Romaji (Latin script); however, the correct pronunciation of the Romaji letters is not taught. The spoken word is taught using Katakana script. Katakana is a syllabary like Hiragana, but among other uses it is used to write foreign words (not just English, but also French, German, Korean etc. In some ways it is analogous to italics in Latin script. Katakana script is used in daily life for many foreign words loaned into Japanese ("Gairaigo").
   Combining characters are not limited to these blocks; for instance, the combining dakuten (U+3099) and combining handakuten (U+309A) are in the Hiragana block, the Devanagari block contains combining vowel signs and other marks for use with that script, and so forth. Combining characters are assigned the Unicode major category "M" ("Mark").
  
  Codepoints U+032A and U+0346–034A are IPA symbols:
  
  BULLET::::- U+032A : dental
  
  BULLET::::- U+0346 : dentolabial
  
  BULLET::::- U+0347 : alveolar
  
  BULLET::::- U+0348 : strong articulation
  
  BULLET::::- U+0349 : weak articulation
  
  BULLET::::- U+034A : denasal
  
  Codepoints U+034B–034E are IPA diacritics for disordered speech:
  
  BULLET::::- U+034B : nasal escape
  
  BULLET::::- U+034C : velopharyngeal friction
  
  BULLET::::- U+034D : labial spreading
   The first kana was a system called "man'yōgana," a set of kanji used solely for their phonetic values, much as Chinese uses characters for their phonetic values in foreign loanwords (especially proper nouns) today. "Man'yōshū", a poetry anthology assembled in 759, is written in this early script. Hiragana developed as a distinct script from cursive "man'yōgana", whereas katakana developed from abbreviated parts of regular script "man'yōgana" as a glossing system to add readings or explanations to Buddhist sutras.
   In archaic forms of Japanese, there existed the "kwa" ( ) and "gwa" ( ) digraphs. In modern Japanese, these phonemes have been phased out of usage and only exist in the extended katakana digraphs for approximating foreign language words.
  
  The singular "n" is pronounced before "t", "ch", "ts", "n", "r", "z", "j" and "d", before "m", "b" and "p", before "k" and "g", at the end of utterances, and some kind of high nasal vowel before vowels, palatal approximants ("y"), fricative consonants "s", "sh", "h", "f" and "w".
   The Unicode block for Kana Supplement is U+1B000–U+1B0FF, and is immediately followed by the Kana Extended-A block (U+1B100–U+1B12F). These blocks include mainly hentaigana (historic or variant hiragana):
  
  The Unicode block for Small Kana Extension is U+1B130–U+1B16F:
  
  In the following character sequences a kana from the /k/ row is modified by a "handakuten" combining mark to indicate that a syllable starts with an initial nasal, known as "bidakuon". As of Unicode 12.0, these character combinations are explicitly called out as Named Sequences.
  
  Section::::See also.
  
  BULLET::::- Japanese writing system
   Furigana
  
  Furigana is most often written in hiragana, though katakana, alphabet letters or other kanji can also be used in certain special cases. In vertical text, "tategaki", the furigana is placed to the right of the line of text; in horizontal text, "yokogaki", it is placed above the line of text, as illustrated below.
  
  or
  
  These examples spell the word "kanji", which is made up of two kanji characters: ("kan", written in hiragana as ) and ("ji", written in hiragana as ).
  
  Section::::Appearance.
   To alleviate the confusion and to save time writing, kanji that were used as "man'yōgana" eventually gave rise to hiragana and katakana. Hiragana was developed from "man'yōgana" written in the highly cursive "sōsho" style popularly used by women; katakana was developed by Buddhist monks as a form of shorthand, utilizing, in most cases, only fragments (for example, the first or last few strokes) of "man'yōgana," characters. In some cases, one "man'yōgana" character for a given syllable gave rise to the current hiragana equivalent, and a different one gave rise to the current katakana equivalent. For example, the hiragana る (ru) is derived from the "man'yōgana" , whereas the katakana ル (ru) is derived from the "man'yōgana" .
   The distinction between regular kana and the smaller character forms, which are used in regular orthography to mark such things as gemination and palatalization, is often not made in furigana: for example, the usual hiragana spelling of the word ("kyakka") is , but in furigana it might be written . This was especially common in old-fashioned movable type printing when smaller fonts were not available. Nowadays, with computer-based printing systems, this occurs less frequently.
  
  Section::::Alignment rules in word processing or typesetting.
   Extensions to Katakana for phonetic transcription of Ainu and other languages were added to the Unicode standard in March 2002 with the release of version 3.2.
  
  The Unicode block for Katakana Phonetic Extensions is U+31F0–U+31FF:
  
  Historic and variant forms of Japanese kana characters were added to the Unicode standard in October 2010 with the release of version 6.0.
  
  The Unicode block for Kana Supplement is U+1B000–U+1B0FF:
  
  The Unicode block for Small Kana Extension is U+1B130–U+1B16F:
  
  Katakana in other Unicode blocks:
  
  BULLET::::- Dakuten and handakuten diacritics are located in the Hiragana block:
   When it is necessary to distinguish between native Japanese "kun'yomi" and Chinese-derived "on'yomi" pronunciations, for example in kanji dictionaries, the Japanese pronunciations are written in hiragana, and the Chinese pronunciations are written in katakana. However, this distinction is really only important in dictionaries and other reference works. In ordinary prose, the script chosen will usually be hiragana. The one general exception to this is "modern" Chinese place names, personal names, and (occasionally) food names—these will often be written with kanji, and katakana used for the furigana; in more casual writing these are simply written in katakana, as borrowed words. Occasionally this style is also used for loanwords from other languages (especially English). For example, the kanji (literally "one horn beast") might be glossed with katakana , "yunikōn", to show the pronunciation of the loanword "unicorn", which is unrelated to the normal reading of the kanji. Generally, though, such loanwords are just written in straight katakana.
   The "myu" kana is extremely rare in originally Japanese words; linguist Haruhiko Kindaichi raises the example of the Japanese family name Omamyūda and claims it is the only occurrence amongst pure Japanese words. Its katakana counterpart is used in many loanwords, however.
  
  Section::::History.
  
  Hiragana developed from "man'yōgana", Chinese characters used for their pronunciations, a practice that started in the 5th century. The oldest examples of Man'yōgana include the Inariyama Sword, an iron sword excavated at the Inariyama Kofun in 1968. This sword is thought to be made in year of (which is A.D. 471 in commonly accepted theory).
   In some cases the same kanji can appear in a given word with different readings. Normally this occurs when a character is duplicated and the reading of the second character has voicing ("rendaku"), as in "hito-bito" "people" (more often written with the iteration mark as ), but in rare cases the readings can be unrelated, as in .
  
  Section::::Readings.:Pronunciation assistance.
   Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems. With one or two minor exceptions, each sound in the Japanese language (strictly, each mora) is represented by one character (or one digraph) in each system. This may be either a vowel such as ""a"" (hiragana あ); a consonant followed by a vowel such as ""ka"" (か); or ""n"" (ん), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English "m", "n", or "ng" (), or like the nasal vowels of French. Because the characters of the kana do not represent single consonants (except in the case of ん "n"), the kana are referred to as syllabaries and not alphabets.
  