The Case of the Mysterious Hiragana Character: a question about double vowels
In my instructional Hiragana book, I encountered a puzzling problem... double vowels.

Now, normally these words, びいち　ぼおる (bīchi bōru) use the characters "i" and "o" to double the vowels after "bi" and "bo". But my Hiragana workbook introduced a new character, which looks just like this "ー" and is used after characters to double their vowels. For instance, this sentence is given in the book: "おおき　な　びーち　ぼーる　が　すなはま　に　ころころ　と　とろがる。", but doesn't explain the mysterious character. I suspect that this character is just used to prolong a vowel, but my question is: what are its specific functions, how come I've never seen it before/can't find it anywhere, and in which situations do they replace just repeating a single vowel?

If you know the answer to tis question (or even understand it), I'd greatly appreciate if you could give any answer possible. Thanks a lot!

Question

The Case of the Mysterious Hiragana Character: a question about double vowels
In my instructional Hiragana book, I encountered a puzzling problem... double vowels.

Now, normally these words, びいち　ぼおる (bīchi bōru) use the characters "i" and "o" to double the vowels after "bi" and "bo". But my Hiragana workbook introduced a new character, which looks just like this "ー" and is used after characters to double their vowels. For instance, this sentence is given in the book: "おおき　な　びーち　ぼーる　が　すなはま　に　ころころ　と　とろがる。", but doesn't explain the mysterious character. I suspect that this character is just used to prolong a vowel, but my question is: what are its specific functions, how come I've never seen it before/can't find it anywhere, and in which situations do they replace just repeating a single vowel?

If you know the answer to tis question (or even understand it), I'd greatly appreciate if you could give any answer possible. Thanks a lot!

Answer

This character is called "長音(ちょうおん [cho:on], chouon)".
This is just used to prolong as you said, but has no other functions.
And as Mytch said, we(japanese) usually use this character to write loan words with 片仮名(かたかな, katakana).

　　ex) エレベーター(えれべーたー [elebe:ta:]) = elevator,  ビリヤード(びりやーど [biliya:do]) = billiard

In this way 長音 in hiragana is just to indicate how to read.
If modifier is simple, you can put together it in a word.

　　ex) ビーチ ボール -> ビーチボール

If you want to separate these words, it better to use 「・」 than 「 」(blank character).

　　ex) ビーチボール -> ビーチ・ボール 

When we write about kind of animal with katakana, 長音 is not used.

　　ex) オオワシ(おおわし [o:wasi]) = steller's sea eagle,  フクロウ(ふくろう [hukuro:]) = owl

Answer

From my experiences, that is only used in Katakana.  So my question to you is, does your book say what those words mean?  If I had to guess, I'd say it means "beach ball" which would make it a loan word itself and should be written in Katakana, not Hiragana.

Of course, I'm not 100% sure about that, maybe someone else can give you a better answer.  I'm curious as to why your instructional book is introducing it that way, as it seems very confusing.

Answers · 2

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