Ruby Character - Uses

Uses

Ruby may be used for different reasons:

• because the character is rare and the pronunciation unknown to many—personal name characters often fall into this category;
• because the character has more than one pronunciation, and the context is insufficient to determine which to use;
• because the intended readers of the text are still learning the language and are not expected to always know the pronunciation and/or meaning of a term;
• because the author is using a nonstandard pronunciation for a character or a term—for example, comic books often employ ruby to emphasize dajare puns, as in Hana Yori Dango (rather than standard "Danshi" reading), and show both of the pronunciation and meaning, as in "One Piece" in One Piece (displayed by ruby character "Wan Piisu" ("One Piece") as the pronunciation and main character "Hitotsunagi no Daihihou" ("The Great Treasure of One Piece") as meaning).

Also, ruby may be used to show the meaning, rather than pronunciation, of a possibly-unfamiliar (usually foreign) or slang word. This is generally used with spoken dialogue and applies only to Japanese publications. The most common form of ruby is called furigana or yomigana and is found in Japanese instructional books, newspapers, comics and books for children.

In Japanese, certain characters, such as the sokuon (促音, tsu?, 小さいつ literally "little tsu") (っ) that indicates a pause before the consonant it precedes, are normally written at about half the size of normal characters. When written as ruby, such characters are usually the same size as other ruby characters. Advancements in technology now allow certain characters to render accurately.

In Chinese, the practice of providing phonetic cues via ruby is rare, but does occur systematically in grade-school level text books or dictionaries. The Chinese have no special name for this practice, as it is not as widespread as in Japan. In Taiwan, it is known as "zhuyin", from the name of the phonetic system employed for this purpose there. It is virtually always used vertically, because publications are normally in a vertical format, and zhuyin is not as easy to read when presented horizontally. Where zhuyin is not used, other Chinese phonetic systems like pinyin are employed.

Ruby characters are not usually used for word-for-word translations between languages, because all natural languages include idioms (where combinations of words have a different meaning than the individual words), the relationship of non-adjacent words is often hard to capture, and usually there is no exact and unique translation for a given word. There are also challenges if the original and translated languages have a different direction (e.g., English reads left to right, but Hebrew reads right to left). However, word-for-word translations are sometimes given as an aid to learning or study of the other language. A common example of this use involves the Christian Bible, which was originally written in Koine Greek, Hebrew, and some Aramaic. Few people can read these original languages proficiently. Thus, many publications of the Christian Bible in its original languages incorporate ruby text with word-by-word translations to another language, such as English, as an aid. Such documents are often termed interlinear documents (where the emphasis is on providing translated text "between the lines"), and often they also include a separate full translation of the text, rather than only using ruby characters, but, again, there are exceptions.

Ruby annotation can also be used in handwriting.