Hiragana chart: yi, ye, wu - where and how?


A very naïve but logical question:

Why are these missing in the Hiragana chart?

  1. yi,

  2. ye,

  3. wu

If there are, where can I find them? How to write them?

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bba5M.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bba5M.png)




They're not "missing", these hiragana characters aren't needed as they don’t
exist in modern Japanese language. The language doesn't have these sounds so
they did not need to be represented. You cannot write them in hiragana.

Some additional conventions exist to write foreign sounds in katakana but
there are still limitations as both systems were originally designed for
writing Japanese words. Until recently, these characters were only used to
represent sounds that exist in Japanese that can be spoken by a Japanese
reader. For example "wu" in chinese names is pronounced as "bu" in Japanese,
"gim" in Korean names is pronounced as "kim" in Japanese, "va" in European
names is pronounced as "ba" in Japanese. Furthermore "fu" and "hu" or "ra" or
"la" are not distinguished in Japanese loanwords from other languages.

There are several exceptions for historical reasons. "wi" (ゐ) and "we" (ゑ) are
used very rarely for names but are now pronounced the same as "i" (い) and "e"
(え) respectively. There is no longer any need to write them differently as the
sounds in modern Japanese are the same. Some brands still use it as their
original historical name such as "Yebisu" (ゑびす/ヱビス) beer.

Another source of confusion is inconsistent romanisation. The "ye" sound for
example, doesn’t exist in modern Japanese but ゑ was written as "we" or "ye"
since romanisation was not standardised at the time. This is also why 円 is
written as "Yen" in English, it was historically read as "wen" (ゑん) and is now
read as "en" えん. So despite non-standard romanisation suggesting it, the sound
"ye" doesn't have a hiragana character as it is not spoken in Japanese.

