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The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
Hiragana (平仮名, ひらがな, IPA: [çiɾaɡaꜜna, çiɾaɡana(ꜜ)]) is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana as well as kanji. It is a phonetic lettering system.
The list is sorted by Japanese reading (on'yomi in katakana, then kun'yomi in hiragana), in accordance with the ordering in the official Jōyō table. This list does not include characters that were present in older versions of the list but have since been removed ( 勺 , 銑 , 脹 , 錘 , 匁 ).
The earliest Japanese romanization system was based on Portuguese orthography.It was developed c. 1548 by a Japanese Catholic named Anjirō. [2] [citation needed] Jesuit priests used the system in a series of printed Catholic books so that missionaries could preach and teach their converts without learning to read Japanese orthography.
In Japanese this is an important distinction in pronunciation; for example, compare サカ saka "hill" with サッカ sakka "author". Geminated consonants are common in transliterations of foreign loanwords; for example, English "bed" is represented as ベッド (beddo).
'Kana' is a compound of kari (仮, 'borrowed; assumed; false') and na (名, 'name'), which eventually collapsed into kanna and ultimately 'kana'. [3]Today it is generally assumed that 'kana' were considered "false" kanji due to their purely phonetic nature, as opposed to mana which were "true" kanji used for their meanings.
Adding these dots to the sides of characters (right side in vertical writing, above in horizontal writing) emphasizes the character in question. It is the Japanese equivalent of the use of italics for emphasis in English. ※ 2228: 1-2-8: 203B: kome (米, "rice") komejirushi (米印, "rice symbol")
The first letters in such phrases give the ordering of the non-voiced initial sounds. For vowel ordering, the vowel sounds in the following English phrase may be used as a mnemonic: Ah, we soon get old. The vowel sounds in the English words approximate the Japanese vowels: a, i, u, e, o.