Hello, a while ago, I was doing quizzes and one of the words (I can't remember which exactly) came across with a sentence with furigana reading that was really unusual. If you put this "瑞典" (sweden) in the dictionary, you are greeted with スヰーデン "ヰ" for sound wi. I searched in the Wikipedia and it says that it "is a nearly-obsolete Japanese kana". So I was wondering, if there are more words like that (and Wikipedia sure gave me some examples like whiskey), even with different kana such as ゑヱ、or even ヸ、would it be possible to have option to forcefully change to a more common one?
While it does have that rare version in there, the first result for both 瑞典 and "sweden" does have the more common katakana reading. There are no plans to prune entries out of the original dictionary data that renshuu is based on, and I'd prefer to keep old entries as well (as long as the newer/more common one is also there) for completeness.
These are called hentai-gana (Yes, really!) and they have been removed from the language and are only used for historical purposes. I don’t understand why Wikipedia calls them mostly obsolete instead of obsolete.
I would think that any sentence using hentai-gana on renshuu.org should be considered a bug and reported as such, but that’s just my opinion. Let’s see what Michael has to say about it.
Edit: looks like he weighed in before me. Hey, Michael, what do think about tagging those entries in the dictionary so users can filter them out if they want to.
