The modern Japanese writing system uses three main scripts:
- Kanji, ideographs from Chinese characters. Chinese characters first came to Japan on articles imported from China. An early instance of such an import was a gold seal given by the emperor of the Eastern Han Dynasty in 57 AD.
The Japanese language itself had no written form at the time kanji was introduced. Originally texts were written in the Chinese language and would have been read as such.
Chinese characters also came to be used to write Japanese words, resulting in the modern kana syllabaries. A writing system called man'yōgana (used in the ancient poetry anthology Man'yōshū) evolved that used a number of Chinese characters for their sound, rather than for their meaning. Man'yōgana written in cursive style evolved into hiragana, a writing system that was accessible to women (who were denied higher education). Katakana emerged via a parallel path: monastery students simplified man'yōgana to a single constituent element. Thus the two other writing systems, hiragana and katakana, referred to collectively as kana, are actually descended from kanji.
In modern Japanese, kanji are used to write parts of the language such as nouns, adjective stems, and verb stems, while hiragana are used to write inflected verb and adjective endings, particles, native Japanese words, words where the kanji is considered too difficult to read or remember, and words in which the kanji is not on the government-sanctioned list of characters. Katakana are used for representing onomatopoeia, non-Japanese loanwords, the names of plants and animals (with exceptions), and for emphasis on certain words. - Hiragana, a set of symbols (syllabary) that approximate syllables that make up words. Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, in which each character represents one mora. Each kana is either a vowel such as "a" (あ); a consonant followed by a vowel such as "ka" (か); or "n" (ん), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English m, n, or ng, or like the nasal vowels of French.
Hiragana are used for words for which there are no kanji, including particles such as kara から "from", and suffixes such as ~san さん "Mr., Mrs., Miss, Ms."
Hiragana are also used in words for which the kanji form is not known to the writer or readers, or is too formal for the writing purpose.
The hiragana consist of a basic set of characters: five singular vowels, 39 distinct consonant-vowel unions and one singular consonant. Additionally, を wo is included (although pronounced the same as vowel お o) bringing up the total count of common use characters to 46.
These basic characters can be modified in various ways. By adding a dakuten marker ( ゛), a voiceless consonant is turned into a voiced consonant: k→g, s→z, t→d, and h→b. Hiragana beginning with an h can also add a handakuten marker ( ゜) changing the h to a p.
A small version of the hiragana for ya, yu or yo (ゃ, ゅ or ょ respectively) may be added to hiragana ending in i. This changes the i vowel sound to a glide (palatalization) to a, u or o. Addition of the small y kana is called yōon.
A small tsu っ called a sokuon indicates that the following consonant is geminated (doubled). For example さっか sakka 'author'. It also sometimes appears at the end of utterances, where it denotes a glottal stop. However, it cannot be used to double the na, ni, nu, ne, no syllables' consonants - to double them, the singular n (ん) is added in front of the syllable. For example さんにん sannin 'three people'.
Hiragana usually spells long vowels with the addition of a second vowel kana. The chōon (long vowel mark) (ー) used in katakana is rarely used with hiragana, for example in the word らーめん, rāmen, but this usage is considered non-standard. In informal writing, small versions of the five vowel kana are sometimes used to represent trailing off sounds (はぁ hā, ねぇ nē). - Katakana, another syllabary used for foreign borrowings and other sounds. Katakana are characterized by short, straight strokes and angular corners, and are the simplest of the Japanese scripts.
In modern Japanese, katakana are most often used for transcription of words from foreign languages (called gairaigo).
For example, "television" is written terebi (テレビ). Similarly, katakana is usually used for country names, foreign places, and personal names. For example, America is written アメリカ Amerika (America also has its own kanji (ateji) Amerika (亜米利加) or for short, Beikoku (米国), which literally means "Rice Country").
Katakana are also used for onomatopoeia, words used to represent sounds. For example, pinpon (ピンポン), the "ding-dong" sound of a doorbell, would usually be written in katakana. Also, katakana is used for words the writer wishes to emphasize.
Technical and scientific terms, such as the names of animal and plant species and minerals, are also commonly written in katakana. Homo sapiens (ホモ・サピエンス), as a species, is written hito (ヒト), rather than its kanji 人.
Katakana are also often, but not always, used for transcription of Japanese company names. For example Suzuki is written スズキ, and Toyota is written トヨタ.
Katakana are also used for emphasis, especially on signs, advertisements, and hoardings (i.e., billboards). For example, it is common to see ココ koko ("here"), ゴミ gomi ("trash") or メガネ megane ("glasses"), and words to be emphasized in a sentence are also sometimes written in katakana, mirroring the European usage of italics.
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