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The report pointed out the difficulties concerning kanji use, and advocated the use of rōmaji, which they considered more convenient. As a result, the gradual abolition of kanji became official policy for the SCAP, and the tōyō kanji list and modern kana usage proposals were drawn up in accordance with this policy.
Its use in rendaku is retained in order to avoid confusion about the origin of the compound. The usage of づ (du) in modern orthography is the same, used in rendaku and after a つ (tsu). 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 ...
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 ...
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.
Today katakana is most commonly used to write words of foreign origin that do not have kanji representations, as well as foreign personal and place names. Katakana is also used to represent onomatopoeia and interjections, emphasis, technical and scientific terms, transcriptions of the Sino-Japanese readings of kanji, and some corporate branding.
Most of these novel katakana forms are digraphs, composed of standard katakana characters, but in digraph combinations not found in native words. For example, the word photo is transcribed as フォト ( fo-to ), where the novel digraph フォ ( fo ) is made up from フ (normally fu ) plus a novel small combining form of オ (normally o ).
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.
Katakana (literally "partial kana", in reference to the practice of using a part of a kanji character) emerged via a parallel path: monastery students simplified man'yōgana to a single constituent element. Thus the two other writing systems, hiragana and katakana, referred to collectively as kana, are descended from kanji.