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'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.
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.
Katakana (片仮名、カタカナ, IPA: [katakaꜜna, kataꜜkana]) is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, [2] kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived from components or fragments of more ...
All combinations of hiragana with dakuten and handakuten used in modern Japanese are available as precomposed characters (including the rare ゔ vu), and can also be produced by using a base hiragana followed by the combining dakuten and handakuten characters (U+3099 and U+309A, respectively). This method is used to add the diacritics to kana ...
The dakuten (Japanese: 濁点, Japanese pronunciation: [dakɯ̥teꜜɴ] or [dakɯ̥teɴ], lit. "voicing mark"), colloquially ten-ten (点々, "dots"), is a diacritic most often used in the Japanese kana syllabaries to indicate that the consonant of a mora should be pronounced voiced, for instance, on sounds that have undergone rendaku (sequential voicing).
Man'yōgana (万葉仮名, Japanese pronunciation: [maɰ̃joꜜːɡana] or [maɰ̃joːɡana]) is an ancient writing system that uses Chinese characters to represent the Japanese language. It was the first known kana system to be developed as a means to represent the Japanese language phonetically. The date of the earliest usage of this type of ...
Wi (hiragana: ゐ, katakana: ヰ) is an obsolete Japanese kana (Japanese phonetic characters, each of which represents one mora), which is normally pronounced [i] in current-day Japanese. The combination of a W-column kana letter with ゐ゙ in hiragana was introduced to represent [vi] in the 19th century and 20th
In historical kana, however, ぢ and づ were sometimes used where じ and ず are used in modern kana. This originally represented a different phoneme (and still does in some dialects), but no longer does in Standard Japanese. The historical-kana-only spellings using ぢ and づ are listed under modern spellings starting with じ and ず ...