Furigana

Furigana (振り仮名) is a Japanese reading aid, consisting of smaller kana or syllabic characters, printed next to a kanji (ideographic character) or other character to indicate its pronunciation. It is one type of ruby text. Furigana is also known as yomigana (読み仮名) or rubi (ルビ) in Japanese. In modern Japanese, it is mostly used to gloss rare kanji, to clarify rare, nonstandard or ambiguous kanji readings, or in children's or learners' materials. Before the post-World War II script reforms, it was more widespread. 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. These examples spell the word kanji, which is made up of two kanji characters: 漢 (kan, written in hiragana as かん) and 字 (ji, written in hiragana as じ). Furigana may be added by character, in which case the furigana characters that correspond to a kanji are centered over that kanji; or by word or phrase, in which case the entire furigana word is centered over several kanji characters, even if the kanji do not represent equal shares of the kana needed to write them. The latter method is more common, especially since some words in Japanese have unique pronunciations (jukujikun) that are not related to readings of any of the characters the word is written with. Furigana fonts are generally sized so that two kana characters fit naturally over one kanji; when more kana are required, this is resolved either by adjusting the furigana by using a condensed font (narrowing the kana), or by adjusting the kanji by intercharacter spacing (adding spaces around the kanji). In case an isolated kanji character has a long reading—for example 〜に携わる (where 携 reads たずさ, tazusa)—the furigana may instead spill over into the space next to the neighboring kana characters, without condensing or changing spacing. Three-kana readings are not uncommon, particularly due to yōon with a long vowel, such as ryō (りょう); five kana are required for kokorozashi (志、こころざし) and uketamawaru (承る、うけたまわる), the longest of any character in the Joyo kanji. Very long readings also occur for certain kanji or symbols which have a gairaigo reading; the word 'centimeter' is generally written as 'cm' (with two half-width characters, so occupying one space) and has the seven-kana reading センチメートル (senchimētoru) (it can also be written as the kanji 糎, though this is very rare); another common example is '%' (the percent sign), which has the five kana reading パーセント (pāsento). These cause severe spacing problems due to length and these words being used as units (hence closely associated to the preceding figure). 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 一角獣 (literally 'one horn beast') might be glossed with katakana ユニコーン, 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 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 却下 (kyakka) is きゃっか, but in furigana it might be written きやつか. 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. Various word processing or typesetting software programs, such as Microsoft Word, Adobe InDesign, Adobe InCopy, etc. have features for adding ruby text, especially Japanese furigana. Among formatting features are different rules for aligning the kana over or to the right of the base text, usually either when the base text string is longer than the furigana string or vice-versa. Extra spaces may be needed depending on the size of the shorter string (either the ruby string or the base string) relatively to the longer one.