Japanese Alphabet
Characteristics and usage of katakana
The katakana syllabary (of the Japanese Alphabet) consists of 48 syllables and was originally considered “men’s writing”. Since the 20th century, katakana have been used mainly to write non-Chinese loan words, onomatopoeic words, foreign names, in telegrams and for emphasis (the equivalent of bold, italic or upper case text in English). Before the 20th century all foreign loanwords were written with kanji.
Katakana are also used to write Ainu, a language spoken on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.
Katakana and the kanji from which they developed
In each column the rōmaji appears on the left, the katakana symbols in the middle and the kanji from which the symbols were derived on the right.
The symbols for ‘wi’ and ‘we’ were made obsolete by the Japanese Minsitry of Education in 1946 as part of its language reforms.
Katakana syllabary (片仮名 / カタカナ)
The symbols on the right are the basic katakana syllabary in the order they appear in dictionaries and indices (reading from left to right and top to bottom). Additional sounds (the symbols on the right) are represented by diacritics and combinations of symbols.
In early versions of hiragana there were often many different characters to represent the same syllable, however the system was eventually simplified so that there was a one-to-one relationship between spoken and written syllables. The present orthography of hiragana was codified by the Japanese government in 1946.
Hiragana and the kanji from which they developed
In each column the rōmaji appears on the left, the hiragana symbols in the middle and the kanji from which they developed on the right. There is some dispute about the orgins of some of the symbols
Characteristics and usage of hiragana
The hiragana syllabary consists of 48 syllables and is mainly used to write word endings, known as okurigana in Japanese. Hiragana are also widely used in materials for children, textbooks, animation and comic books, to write Japanese words which are not normally written with kanji, such as adverbs and some nouns and adjectives, or for words whose kanji are obscure or obselete.
Hiragana are also sometimes written above or along side kanji to indicate pronunciation, especially if the pronunication is obscure or non-standard. Hiragana used in this way are known as furigana or ruby. In horizontal texts, the furigana appear above the kanji and in vertical texts, the furigana appear on the right of the kanji. In newspapers it is a legal requirement for furigana to be attached to kanji which are not included in the official list of the 1,945 most frequently-used kanji. Newspapers in fact rarely use kanji not included in this list.
