Kana

Kana (仮名) are syllabic Japanese scripts, a part of the Japanese writing system contrasted with the logographic Chinese characters known in Japan as kanji (漢字). There are three kana scripts: modern cursive hiragana (ひらがな);^[2] modern angular katakana (カタカナ); and the old syllabic use of kanji known as man'yōgana (万葉仮名) that was ancestral to both. Hentaigana (変体仮名, "variant kana") are historical variants of modern standard hiragana. In modern Japanese, hiragana and katakana have directly corresponding character sets (different sets of characters representing the same sounds).

Katakana with a few additions is also used to write Ainu. Taiwanese kana was used in Taiwanese Hokkien as a gloss (furigana) for Chinese characters during Taiwan under Japanese rule.

Each kana character (syllabogram) corresponds to one sound in the Japanese language. This is always CV (consonant onset with vowel nucleus), such as ka, ki, etc., or V (vowel), such as a, i, etc., with the sole exception of the C grapheme for nasal codas usually romanised as n. This structure had made some scholars label the system moraic instead of syllabic, because it requires the combination of two syllabograms to represent a CVC syllable with coda (i.e. CVn, CVm, CVng), a CVV syllable with complex nucleus (i.e. multiple or expressively long vowels), or a CCV syllable with complex onset (i.e. including a glide, CyV, CwV).

Due to the limited number of phonemes in Japanese, as well as the relatively rigid syllable structure, the kana system is a very accurate representation of spoken Japanese.

Hiragana and katakana

The following table reads, in gojūon order, as a, i, u, e, o (down first column), then ka, ki, ku, ke, ko (down second column), and so on. n appears on its own at the end. Asterisks mark unused combinations.

• There are presently no kana for ye, yi or wu, as corresponding syllables do not occur in modern Japanese natively.
  • The [jɛ] (ye) sound is believed to have existed in pre-Classical Japanese, mostly prior to the advent of kana, and can be represented by the man'yōgana kanji 江.^[3][4] There was an archaic Hiragana ()^[5] derived from the man'yōgana ye kanji 江,^[3] which is encoded into Unicode at code point U+1B001 (𛀁),^[6][7] but it is not widely supported. It is believed that e and ye become both pronounced mostly as ye, and that the pronunciation e surpassed ye during the Edo period.^[4] A hiragana we, ゑ, which also came to be pronounced as [jɛ] (ye), as demonstrated by 17th century-era European sources,^[8] still exists but is considered archaic, and it was eliminated from official orthography in 1946. In modern orthography, if necessary, [je] (ye) may be written as いぇ (イェ); however, this usage is limited and nonstandard.
  • The modern Katakana e, エ, derives from the man'yōgana 江, originally pronounced ye;^[5] a "Katakana letter Archaic E" () derived from the man'yōgana 衣 (e)^[5] is encoded into Unicode at code point U+1B000 (𛀀),^[6] due to being used for that purpose in scholarly works on classical Japanese.^[9]
  • Some gojūon tables published during the 19th century list additional Katakana in the ye (), wu () and yi () positions.^[10] These are not presently used, and the latter two sounds never existed in Japanese.^[4][11] They do not presently exist in Unicode. These sources also list (Unicode U+1B006, 𛀆) in the Hiragana yi position, and in the ye position.^[10]
• While no longer part of standard Japanese orthography, wi and we are sometimes used stylistically, as in ウヰスキー for whisky and ヱビス or ゑびす for Japanese kami Ebisu, and Yebisu, a brand of beer named after Ebisu. Hiragana wi and we are still used in certain Okinawan scripts, while katakana wi and we are still used in Ainu.
• wo is preserved only in a single use, as a grammatical particle, normally written in hiragana.
• si, ti, tu, hu, wi, we and wo are often romanized respectively as shi, chi, tsu, fu, i, e and o instead, according to contemporary pronunciation.

Modern usage

The difference in usage between hiragana and katakana is stylistic. Usually, hiragana is the default syllabary, and katakana is used in certain special cases.

Hiragana is used to write native Japanese words with no kanji representation (or whose kanji is thought obscure or difficult), as well as grammatical elements such as particles and inflections (okurigana).

Today katakana is most commonly used to write words of foreign origin that do not have kanji representations, as well as foreign personal and place names. Katakana is also used to represent onomatopoeia and interjections, emphasis, technical and scientific terms, transcriptions of the Sino-Japanese readings of kanji, and some corporate branding.

Kana can be written in small form above or next to lesser-known kanji in order to show pronunciation; this is called furigana. Furigana is used most widely in children's or learners' books. Literature for young children who do not yet know kanji may dispense with it altogether and instead use hiragana combined with spaces.

History

Development of hiragana and katakana

The first kana was a system called man'yōgana, a set of kanji used solely for their phonetic values, much as Chinese uses characters for their phonetic values in foreign loanwords (especially proper nouns) today. Man'yōshū, a poetry anthology assembled in 759, is written in this early script. Hiragana developed as a distinct script from cursive man'yōgana, whereas katakana developed from abbreviated parts of regular script man'yōgana as a glossing system to add readings or explanations to Buddhist sutras.

Kana is traditionally said to have been invented by the Buddhist priest Kūkai in the ninth century. Kūkai certainly brought the Siddhaṃ script of India home on his return from China in 806; his interest in the sacred aspects of speech and writing led him to the conclusion that Japanese would be better represented by a phonetic alphabet than by the kanji which had been used up to that point. The modern arrangement of kana reflects that of Siddhaṃ, but the traditional iroha arrangement follows a poem which uses each kana once.

The present set of kana was codified in 1900, and rules for their usage in 1946.^[12]

Collation

Kana are the basis for collation in Japanese. They are taken in the order given by the gojūon (あ い う え お … わ を ん), though iroha (い ろ は に ほ へ と … せ す (ん)) ordering is used for enumeration in some circumstances. Dictionaries differ in the sequence order for long/short vowel distinction, small tsu and diacritics. As Japanese does not use word spaces (except as a tool for children), there can be no word-by-word collation; all collation is kana-by-kana.

In Unicode

The hiragana range in Unicode is U+3040 ... U+309F, and the katakana range is U+30A0 ... U+30FF. The obsolete and rare characters (wi and we) also have their proper code points.

Characters U+3095 and U+3096 are hiragana small ka and small ke, respectively. U+30F5 and U+30F6 are their katakana equivalents. Characters U+3099 and U+309A are combining dakuten and handakuten, which correspond to the spacing characters U+309B and U+309C. U+309D is the hiragana iteration mark, used to repeat a previous hiragana. U+309E is the voiced hiragana iteration mark, which stands in for the previous hiragana but with the consonant voiced (k becomes g, h becomes b, etc.). U+30FD and U+30FE are the katakana iteration marks. U+309F is a ligature of yori (より) sometimes used in vertical writing. U+30FF is a ligature of koto (コト), also found in vertical writing.

Additionally, there are halfwidth equivalents to the standard fullwidth katakana. These are encoded within the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block (U+FF00–U+FFEF), starting at U+FF65 and ending at U+FF9F (characters U+FF61–U+FF64 are halfwidth punctuation marks):

There is also a small "Katakana Phonetic Extensions" range (U+31F0 ... U+31FF), which includes some extra characters for writing the Ainu language.

Unicode also includes "Katakana letter archaic E" (U+1B000), as well as 255 archaic Hiragana, in the Kana Supplement block.^[13] It also includes a further 31 archaic Hiragana in the Kana Extended-A block.^[14]

See also

Japanese writing
Components
Kanji Stroke order Radicals Kyōiku kanji Jōyō kanji Jinmeiyō kanji Hyōgai kanji List of kanji by stroke count List of kanji by concept
Kana Hiragana Katakana Hentaigana Man'yōgana Sogana Gojūon
Typographic symbols Japanese punctuation Iteration mark
Uses
Syllabograms Furigana Okurigana Braille
Romanization
Rōmaji Hepburn (colloquial) Kunrei (ISO) Nihon (ISO transliteration) JSL (transliteration) Wāpuro (keyboard)

• Gojūon
• Romanization of Japanese
• Transliteration and Transcription (linguistics)
• Historical kana orthography
• Man'yōgana
• Hentaigana

References

External links

• Hiragana & katakana chart and writing practice sheet
• Practice pronunciation and stroke order of Kana
• Origin of Hiragana
• Origin of Katakana
• Kana web translator - Transliterate Kana to Rōmaji
• Kana Copybook (PDF)