Furigana

Furigana (Japanese振り 仮名) are a Japanese reading aid. It is to Hiragana or Katakana characters, which are written in Japanese characters next to a kanji or other character to indicate its pronunciation. They are especially alongside rarer kanji that might not be known to the reader or might have forgotten, but are also used as a reading aid in the literature, which primarily aimed at children. In horizontally written texts, the furigana characters are mostly about the kanji in vertically written texts they are right next to the kanji.

An example:

In this example, the word is kanji in Kanji written as汉字and is explained by the Hiraganaかんじ.

They are also used to represent a non- standard compliant pronunciation, eg the furiganaブルー( Buru ), the Japanese pronunciation of English blue, for the character青that would normally read as ao ( i) without this reference. With furigana is also the difference between the spoken word and meaning -meaning indicated: For example, in a science fiction novel Earth as地球(regular pronunciation: Chikyu ) written as a debate but the furiganaふるさと, Furusato, are used, which actually mean "home". The implication is then that the figures "home" say and doing the " earth " mine.

In XHTML furigana characters can be represented by ruby markup, but not all web browsers support this construction. Example:汉字(かんじ). Browser without furigana showing support of hiragana text in brackets after the kanji. Furigana are also called Ruby / Rubi (ルビ).

Also, Unicode provides a number of control characters for such comments.