KATAKANA
Katakana (片仮名, カタカナ or かたかな?) is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet. The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji.
Katakana are characterized by short, straight strokes and angular corners, and are the simplest of the Japanese scripts.
There are two main systems of ordering katakana: the old-fashioned iroha ordering, and the more prevalent gojūon ordering.
In modern Japanese, katakana are most often used for transcription of words from foreign languages[4] (called gairaigo). For example, "television" is written terebi (テレビ?). Similarly, katakana is usually used for country names, foreign places, and personal names. For example, America is written アメリカ Amerika (America also has its own kanji (ateji) Amerika (亜米利加?) or for short, Beikoku (米国?), which literally means "Rice Country" – though the connection with the "rice" character, 米, is purely a phonetic one).
Katakana are also used for onomatopoeia, words used to represent sounds – for example, pinpon (ピンポン?), the "ding-dong" sound of a doorbell.
Technical and scientific terms, such as the names of animal and plant species and minerals, are also commonly written in katakana. Homo sapiens (ホモ・サピエンス?), as a species, is written hito (ヒト?), rather than its kanji 人.
Katakana are also 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. Katakana are also used for emphasis, especially on signs, advertisements, and hoardings (i.e., billboards). For example, it is common to see ココ koko ("here"), ゴミ gomi ("trash") or メガネ megane ("glasses"). Words the writer wishes to emphasize in a sentence are also sometimes written in katakana, mirroring the European usage of italics.
Pre-World War II official documents mix katakana and kanji in the same way that hiragana and kanji are mixed in modern Japanese texts, that is, katakana were used for okurigana and particles such as wa or o.
Katakana were also used for telegrams in Japan before 1988, and for computer systems—before the introduction of multibyte characters—in the 1980s. Most computers in that era used katakana instead of kanji or hiragana for output.
Although words borrowed from ancient Chinese are usually written in kanji, loanwords from modern Chinese dialects which are borrowed directly rather than using the Sino-Japanese on'yomi readings, are often written in katakana. Examples include:
The very common Chinese loanword rāmen, written in katakana as ラーメン in Japanese, is rarely written with its kanji (拉麺).
There are rare cases where the opposite has occurred, with kanji forms created from words originally written in katakana. An example of this is コーヒー kōhī, ("coffee"), which can be alternatively written as 珈琲. This kanji usage is occasionally employed by coffee manufacturers or coffee shops for novelty.
Katakana are sometimes used instead of hiragana as furigana to give the pronunciation of a word written in Roman characters, or for a foreign word, which is written as kanji for the meaning, but intended to be pronounced as the original.
Katakana are also sometimes used to indicate words being spoken in a foreign or otherwise unusual accent, by foreign characters, robots, etc. For example, in a manga, the speech of a foreign character or a robot may be represented by コンニチワ konnichiwa ("hello") instead of the more usual hiragana こんにちは.
Katakana are also used to indicate the on'yomi (Chinese-derived readings) of a kanji in a kanji dictionary.
Some Japanese personal names are written in katakana. This was more common in the past, hence elderly women often have katakana names.
It is very common to write words with difficult-to-read kanji in katakana. This phenomenon is often seen with medical terminology. For example, in the word 皮膚科 hifuka ("dermatology"), the second kanji, 膚, is considered difficult to read, and thus the word hifuka is commonly written 皮フ科 or ヒフ科, mixing kanji and katakana. Similarly, the difficult-to-read kanji such as 癌 gan ("cancer") are often written in katakana or hiragana.
Katakana is also used for traditional musical notations, as in the Tozan-ryū of shakuhachi, and in sankyoku ensembles with koto, shamisen, and shakuhachi.
Foreign phrases are sometimes transliterated with a space separating the words, called a nakaguro (中黒?) (middle dot). When it is assumed that the reader knows the separate gairaigo words in the phrase, the middle dot is omitted. For example, the phrase コンピュータゲーム konpyūta gēmu ("computer game") contains two well-known gairaigo, and therefore is not written with a middle dot.
Katakana spelling differs slightly from hiragana. While hiragana spells long vowels with the addition of a second vowel kana, katakana usually uses a vowel extender mark called a chōon. This is a short line following the direction of the text, horizontal for yokogaki (horizontal text), and vertical for tategaki (vertical text). It is generally used in foreign loanwords; long vowels in katakana words of Japanese origin are usually spelled as they would be in hiragana. There are exceptions, such as ローソク (蝋燭 rōsoku "candle") or ケータイ(携帯 kētai "mobile phone").
A small tsu (ッ) called a sokuon indicates that the following consonant is geminate; this is represented in rōmaji by doubling the consonant that follows the tsu. For example, "bed" is represented in katakana as ベッド (beddo). The sokuon may also be used to approximate a non-native sound; Bach is written バッハ (Bahha); Mach as マッハ (Mahha).
Foreign sounds can be difficult to express in Japanese, resulting in spellings such as フルシチョフ Furushichofu (Khrushchev), アリー・ハーメネイー Arī Hāmeneī (Ali Khamenei) and イツハク・パールマン Itsuhaku Pāruman or イツァーク・パールマン Itsāku Pāruman (Itzhak Perlman).
Notes
1. ^ a b c These now-obsolete katakana appeared in some textbooks as early as 1873 (Meiji 6), but never became widespread.
2. ^ In modern times, ウォ ("wo") is used as the representation of a "wo" sound instead. The katakana version of the wo kana, ヲ, is primarily used, albeit rarely, to represent the particle を in katakana. The particle is commonly pronounced the same as the o kana.
3. ^ a b c d e These kana are primarily used for indicating a voiced consonant in the middle of a compound word and can never begin a word. Rarely used in katakana.
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