Ten-ten and beyond

Up until now, the "softening marks" have probably made sense. It seems natural that ka
should turn to ga. It's not hard to see that a softened so should be zo. But at this point, you're
probably wondering how on earth you can soften an h-sound.

Well, that's just it. You really can't. In the case of the h-series, the marks that we add will do
the opposite of what ten-ten normally do. They'll actually harden the sounds.

Adding ten-ten to the h-series makes every character start with a b-sound. Therefore, ha with
ten-ten turns to ba, fu turns to bu, and so on.

But wait, there's more. In this series only, we can go even further. We can add a circle, or
maru, and get five more sounds. Adding maru to a character from this series makes it start
with a p-sound. Therefore, hi plus maru makes the sound pi. He plus maru becomes pe, and
so on. Here's what the characters look like with ten-ten and maru attached.