It was originally fifty symbols, until certain of them were rendered obsolete (in hiragana, “yi”, “ye” and “wu”; a few more in katakana). And we still have some lenition changes (where hiragana “ha” turns into “wa” when used as a particle; “wo” being pronounced “o”). The dakuten and handakuten diacritics expand the sounds.
When it comes to katakana and the Ainu language, they have those small terminal kana that represent terminal consonants. I’ve also toyed with the idea of using dakuten and handakuten with katakana in certain cases to represent non-Japanese vocal sounds (e.g. a dakuten with “ra” to more closely be pronounced like English or Chinese “la”).
Interesting idea. I do wonder if it'd catch on.
It was originally fifty symbols, until certain of them were rendered obsolete (in hiragana, “yi”, “ye” and “wu”; a few more in katakana).
It'd kinda be nice if they went back to the fifty... for uniformity's sake.
I do like that, linguistically speaking, there's only like two or so irregular verbs. [At least common ones; I only took 4 years in college.]