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Dakuten
The , colloquially , is a diacritic most often used in the Japanese kana syllabaries to indicate that the consonant of a syllable should be pronounced voiced, for instance, on sounds that have undergone rendaku (sequential voicing). The , colloquially , is a diacritic used with the kana for syllables starting with ''h'' to indicate that they should instead be pronounced with . History The ''kun'yomi'' pronunciation of the character is ''nigori''; hence the ''daku-ten'' may also be called the ''nigori-ten''. This character, meaning ''muddy'' or ''turbid'', stems from historical Chinese phonology, where consonants were traditionally classified as ''clear'' ( "voiceless"), ''lesser-clear'' ( " aspirated") and ''muddy'' ( "voiced"). (See: Middle Chinese § Initials) ''Dakuten'' were used sporadically since the start of written Japanese; their use tended to become more common as time went on. The modern practice of using dakuten in all cases of voicing in all writing only came ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hiragana
is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' literally means "flowing" or "simple" kana ("simple" originally as contrasted with kanji). Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems. With few exceptions, each mora in the Japanese language is represented by one character (or one digraph) in each system. This may be either a vowel such as ''"a"'' (hiragana あ); a consonant followed by a vowel such as ''"ka"'' (か); or ''"n"'' (ん), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English ''m'', ''n'' or ''ng'' () when syllable-final or like the nasal vowels of French, Portuguese or Polish. Because the characters of the kana do not represent single consonants (except in the case of ん "n"), the kana are referred to as syllabic symbols and not alphabetic letters. Hiragana is used to write ''okurigana'' (kana suffixes following a kanji ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Katakana
is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, 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 complex kanji. Katakana and hiragana are both kana systems. With one or two minor exceptions, each syllable (strictly mora) in the Japanese language is represented by one character or ''kana'' in each system. Each kana represents either a vowel such as "''a''" (katakana ア); a consonant followed by a vowel such as "''ka''" (katakana カ); or "''n''" (katakana ン), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English ''m'', ''n'' or ''ng'' () or like the nasal vowels of Portuguese or Galician. In contrast to the hiragana syllabary, which is used for Japanese words not covered by kanji and for grammatical inflections, the katakana syllabary usage is comparable to italics in En ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kana
The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters (kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most prominent magana system being ; the two descendants of man'yōgana, (2) , and (3) . There are also , which are historical variants of the now-standard hiragana. In current usage, 'kana' can simply mean ''hiragana'' and ''katakana''. Katakana, with a few additions, are also used to write Ainu. A number of systems exist to write the Ryūkyūan languages, in particular Okinawan, in hiragana. Taiwanese kana were used in Taiwanese Hokkien as glosses (ruby text or ''furigana'') for Chinese characters in Taiwan when it was under Japanese rule. Each kana character (syllabogram) corresponds to one sound or whole syllable in the Japanese language, unlike kanji regular script, which corresponds to a meaning (logogram). Apart from the five vowels, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diacritic
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacritic'' is a noun, though it is sometimes used in an attributive sense, whereas ''diacritical'' is only an adjective. Some diacritics, such as the acute ( ◌́ ) and grave ( ◌̀ ), are often called ''accents''. Diacritics may appear above or below a letter or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters. The main use of diacritics in Latin script is to change the sound-values of the letters to which they are added. Historically, English has used the diaeresis diacritic to indicate the correct pronunciation of ambiguous words, such as "coöperate", without which the letter sequence could be misinterpreted to be pronounced . Other examples are the acute and grave accents, which can indi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Half-width Kana
are katakana characters displayed compressed at half their normal width (a 1:2 aspect ratio), instead of the usual square (1:1) aspect ratio. For example, the usual (full-width) form of the katakana ''ka'' is カ while the half-width form is ｶ. Half-width hiragana is not included in Unicode, although it's usable on Web or in e-books via CSS's font-feature-settings: "hwid" 1 with Adobe-Japan1-6 based OpenType fonts. Half-width kanji is not usable on modern computers, but is used in some receipt printers, electric bulletin board and old computers. Half-width kana were used in the early days of Japanese computing, to allow Japanese characters to be displayed on the same grid as monospaced fonts of Latin characters. Half-width kanji were not used. Half-width kana characters are not generally used today, but find some use in specific settings, such as cash register displays, on shop receipts, Japanese digital television and DVD subtitles, and mailing address labels. Their usage is so ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Combining Character
In digital typography, combining characters are characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritical marks (including combining accents). Unicode also contains many precomposed characters, so that in many cases it is possible to use both combining diacritics and precomposed characters, at the user's or application's choice. This leads to a requirement to perform Unicode normalization before comparing two Unicode strings and to carefully design encoding converters to correctly map all of the valid ways to represent a character in Unicode to a legacy encoding to avoid data loss. In Unicode, the main block of combining diacritics for European languages and the International Phonetic Alphabet is U+0300–U+036F. Combining diacritical marks are also present in many other blocks of Unicode characters. In Unicode, diacritics are always added after the main character (in contrast to some older c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Combining Character
In digital typography, combining characters are characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritical marks (including combining accents). Unicode also contains many precomposed characters, so that in many cases it is possible to use both combining diacritics and precomposed characters, at the user's or application's choice. This leads to a requirement to perform Unicode normalization before comparing two Unicode strings and to carefully design encoding converters to correctly map all of the valid ways to represent a character in Unicode to a legacy encoding to avoid data loss. In Unicode, the main block of combining diacritics for European languages and the International Phonetic Alphabet is U+0300–U+036F. Combining diacritical marks are also present in many other blocks of Unicode characters. In Unicode, diacritics are always added after the main character (in contrast to some older c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rakuyōshū
The was a 1598 Japanese dictionary of kanji "Chinese characters" and compounds in three parts. The Jesuit Mission Press published it at Nagasaki along with other early Japanese language reference works, such as the 1603 ''Nippo Jisho'' Japanese–Portuguese dictionary. The ''Rakuyōshū'', also known as the ''Rakuyoshu'' or ''Rakuyôshû'', is notable as the first dictionary to separate ''kanji'' readings between Chinese loanword ''on'' ( 音 "pronunciation") and native Japanese ''kun'' ( 訓 "meaning"). In contrast with the numerous ''Rakuyōshū'' studies written in Japanese, the primary research in English is by Joseph Koshimi Yamagiwa, Professor of Japanese at the University of Michigan, and Don Clifford Bailey, Professor of Japanese at the University of Arizona. Title Although the title ''Rakuyōshū'' (落葉集) literally reads as a ''shū'' (集 "collection; assembly") of ''rakuyō'' (落葉 "fallen leaves", or ''ochiba'' 落ち葉 in ''kun'' reading), the preface exp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Iteration Mark
Iteration marks are characters or punctuation marks that represent a duplicated character or word. Chinese In Chinese, (usually appearing as ) or is used in casual writing to represent a doubled character. However, it is not used in formal writing anymore, and it never appeared in printed matter. In a tabulated table or list, vertical repetition can be represented by a ditto mark (). History Iteration marks have been occasionally used for more than two thousand years in China. The example image shows an inscription in bronze script, a variety of formal writing dating to the Zhou Dynasty, that ends with , where the small ("two") is used as iteration marks in the phrase ("descendants to use and to treasure"). Malayo-Polynesian languages In Filipino, Indonesian, and Malay, words that are repeated can be shortened with the use of numeral "2". For example, the Malay ("words", from single ) can be shortened to , and ("to walk around", from single ) can be shortened to . The usag ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Japanese Phonology
The phonology of Japanese features about 15 consonant phonemes, the cross-linguistically typical five-vowel system of , and a relatively simple phonotactic distribution of phonemes allowing few consonant clusters. It is traditionally described as having a mora as the unit of timing, with each mora taking up about the same length of time, so that the disyllabic ("Japan") may be analyzed as and dissected into four moras, , , , and . Standard Japanese is a pitch-accent language, wherein the position or absence of a pitch drop may determine the meaning of a word: "chopsticks", "bridge", "edge" (see Japanese pitch accent). Unless otherwise noted, the following describes the standard variety of Japanese based on the Tokyo dialect. Consonants *Voiceless stops are slightly aspirated: less aspirated than English stops, but more so than Spanish. *, a remnant of Old Japanese, now occurs almost always medially in compounds, typically as a result of gemination (as in 切符 ''k ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rendaku
is a phenomenon in Japanese morphophonology that governs the voicing of the initial consonant of a non-initial portion of a compound or prefixed word. In modern Japanese, ''rendaku'' is common but at times unpredictable, with certain words unaffected by it. While kanji do not indicate ''rendaku'', it is marked in kana with ''dakuten'' (voicing mark). Origin Rendaku was initially an automatic and predictable process in Japanese. One theory states that rendaku was originally a way to distinguish compound words from saying a word twice when comparing two words or listing things (compare ひとびと ''hitobito'' "people" – with rendaku – versus ひと、ひと ''hito hito'' "one person, another person" – without rendaku). Native Japanese words never begin with a voiced obstruent or sibilant (b, d, g, z, etc.) so rendaku was merely an allophonic detail that never caused any misunderstanding. However, after the 4th century, Japan started borrowing words and characters from ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
