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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.
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 ).
In Japanese this is an important distinction in pronunciation; for example, compare さか, saka, "hill" with さっか, sakka, "author". However, it cannot be used to double an n – for this purpose, the singular n (ん) is added in front of the syllable, as in みんな (minna, "all").
This symbol is known as an interpunct in English. ゠ ＝ 30A0, FF1D: daburu haifun (ダブルハイフン, "double hyphen") Sometimes replaces an English en dash or hyphen when writing foreign words in katakana. It is also rarely used to separate given and family names, though the middle dot (nakaguro) is much more common in these
Katakana are often (but not always) used for transcription of Japanese company names. For example, Suzuki is written スズキ , and Toyota is written トヨタ . As these are common family names, Suzuki being the second most common in Japan, [ 7 ] using katakana helps distinguish company names from surnames in writing.
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.
The jōyō kanji (常用漢字, Japanese pronunciation: [dʑoːjoːkaꜜɲdʑi] ⓘ, lit. "regular-use kanji") are those kanji listed on the Jōyō kanji hyō (常用漢字表, literally "list of regular-use kanji"), officially announced by the Japanese Ministry of Education. The current list of 2,136 characters was issued in 2010.
In earlier Japanese, digraphs could also be formed with w-kana. Although obsolete in modern Japanese, the digraphs くゎ (/kʷa/) and くゐ/くうぃ(/kʷi/), are preserved in certain Okinawan orthographies. In addition, the kana え can be used in Okinawan to form the digraph くぇ, which represents the /kʷe/ sound.