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At the time, documents were written in kanji and hiragana, derived from Japan. Although generally agreed among linguists to be a distinct language, most Japanese, as well as some Okinawans, tend to think of Okinawan as merely a regional dialect of Japanese , even though it is not intelligible to monolingual Japanese speakers. [ 1 ]
Hiragana is used to write okurigana (kana suffixes following a kanji root, for example to inflect verbs and adjectives), various grammatical and function words including particles, and miscellaneous other native words for which there are no kanji or whose kanji form is obscure or too formal for the writing purpose. [5]
The Japanese language has many homophones, and conversion of a kana spelling (representing the pronunciation) into a kanji (representing the standard written form of the word) is often a one-to-many process. The kana to kanji converter offers a list of candidate kanji writings for the input kana, and the user may use the space bar or arrow keys ...
Hiragana developed from man'yōgana written in the highly cursive sōsho (草書) style popularly used by women; meanwhile, katakana was developed by Buddhist monks as a form of shorthand, utilizing, in most cases, only fragments (for example, usually the first or last few strokes) of man'yōgana characters.
For example, the Japanese word for "to do" (する suru) is written with two hiragana: す (su) + る (ru). Katakana are generally used to write loanwords, foreign names and onomatopoeia. For example, retasu was borrowed from the English "lettuce", and is written with three katakana: レ (re) + タ (ta) + ス (su).
These characters and scripts are altered to form hidden messages. Hiragana consisting of connected strokes are replaced by symbols or Greek letters: for example, su (す) may be rendered as the section symbol §. Hiragana consisting of detached elements are replaced by sequences of kana, Western letters, or symbols.
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For example, while the hiragana reading "ha" has only one form in modern Japanese (は), until the Meiji era (1868–1912) it was written in various forms, including , , and . The shift to using only one character for each sound occurred as part of the 1900 script reform [3] [4], which also included other changes to the written language to ...