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In the modern Japanese system of sound order, it occupies the second position of the mora chart, between あ and う. Additionally, it is the first letter in Iroha, before ろ. Both represent the sound [i]. In the Ainu language, katakana イ is written as y in their Latin-based mora chart, and a small ィ after another katakana represents a ...
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Japanese on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Japanese in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
Accented letters: â ç è é ê î ô û, rarely ë ï ; ù only in the word où, à only at the ends of a few words (including à).Never á í ì ó ò ú.; Angle quotation marks: « » (though "curly-Q" quotation marks are also used); dialogue traditionally indicated by means of dashes.
Japanese phonology has been affected by the presence of several layers of vocabulary in the language: in addition to native Japanese vocabulary, Japanese has a large amount of Chinese-based vocabulary (used especially to form technical and learned words, playing a similar role to Latin-based vocabulary in English) and loanwords from other ...
Used to separate foreign words and items in lists. For example, if ビルゲイツ ("BillGates") is written instead of ビル・ゲイツ ("Bill Gates") , a Japanese speaker unfamiliar with the name might have difficulty working out where the boundary between the given name and surname lies.
The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived from components or fragments of more complex kanji. Katakana and hiragana are both kana systems. With one or two minor exceptions, each syllable (strictly mora) in the Japanese language is represented by one character or kana in each system.
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.
'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.