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Some Japanese personal names are written in katakana. This was more common in the past, hence elderly women often have katakana names. This was particularly common among women in the Meiji and Taishō periods, when many poor, illiterate parents were unwilling to pay a scholar to give their daughters names in kanji. [8]
There are a small number of municipalities in Japan whose names are written in hiragana or katakana, together known as kana, rather than kanji as is traditional for Japanese place names. [1] Many city names written in kana have kanji equivalents that are either phonetic manyōgana, or whose kanji are outside of the jōyō kanji.
The katakana form has become increasingly popular as an emoticon in the Western world due to its resemblance to a smiling face. This character may be combined with a dakuten, forming じ in hiragana, ジ in katakana, and ji in Hepburn romanization; the pronunciation becomes /zi/ (phonetically [d͡ʑi] or [ʑi] in the middle of words).
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.
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.
In earlier stages of Japanese, different realizations of the moraic nasal were actually indicated in writing. For example, during the Heian period ( Early Middle Japanese ), the "lingual nasal" was spelt differently when followed by a lingual consonant ( /n, s/ ) compared to the "labial nasal" when followed by a labial consonant ( /p, b, m/ ).
Sa (hiragana: さ, katakana: サ) is one of the Japanese kana, which each represent one mora. Both represent [sa]. The shapes of these kana originate from 左 and 散, respectively. Like き, the hiragana character may be written with or without linking the lower line to the rest of the character.
Ha (hiragana: は, katakana: ハ) is one of the Japanese kana, each of which represent one mora.Both represent [ha].They are also used as a grammatical particle (in such cases, they denote [wa], including in the greeting "kon'nichiwa") and serve as the topic marker of the sentence.