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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 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.
Written Japanese uses several different scripts: kanji (Chinese characters), 2 sets of kana (phonetic syllabaries) and roman letters. While kana and roman letters can be typed directly into a computer, entering kanji is a more complicated process as there are far more kanji than there are keys on most keyboards.
The [jɛ] (ye) sound is believed to have existed in pre-Classical Japanese, mostly before the advent of kana, and can be represented by the man'yōgana kanji 江. [ 7 ] [ 8 ] There was an archaic Hiragana ( ) [ 9 ] derived from the man'yōgana ye kanji 江, [ 7 ] which is encoded into Unicode at code point U+1B001 (𛀁), [ 10 ] [ 11 ] but it ...
Words that do have common kanji renditions may also sometimes be written instead in hiragana, according to an individual author's preference, for example to impart an informal feel. Hiragana is also used to write furigana , a reading aid that shows the pronunciation of kanji characters.
In some cases, Japanese coinages have subsequently been borrowed back into Chinese, such as 鮟鱇 (ankō, “monkfish”). The underlying word for jukujikun is a native Japanese word or foreign borrowing, which either does not have an existing kanji spelling (either kun'yomi or ateji) or for which a new kanji spelling is produced. Most often ...
On non-Japanese keyboards, option-or control-key sequences can perform all of the tasks mentioned below. On most Japanese keyboards, one key switches between Roman characters and Japanese characters. Sometimes, each mode (Roman and Japanese) may even have its own key, in order to prevent ambiguity when the user is typing quickly.
Katakana glyphs in the same row or column do not share common graphic characteristics. Three of the syllabograms to be expected, yi, ye and wu, may have been used idiosyncratically with varying glyphs, but never became conventional in any language and are not present at all in modern Japanese.