Ka (
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 contrast ...
: か,
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 fr ...
: カ) is one of the Japanese
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 pr ...
, which each represent one
mora
Mora may refer to:
People
* Mora (surname)
Places Sweden
* Mora, Säter, Sweden
* Mora, Sweden, the seat of Mora Municipality
* Mora Municipality, Sweden
United States
* Mora, Louisiana, an unincorporated community
* Mora, Minnesota, a city
* M ...
. Both represent . The shapes of these kana both originate from 加.
The character can be combined with a
dakuten, to form が in hiragana, ガ in katakana and ''ga'' in
Hepburn romanization. The phonetic value of the modified character is in initial positions and varying between and in the middle of words.
A
handakuten
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 , co ...
(゜) does not occur with ''ka'' in normal Japanese text, but it may be used by linguists to indicate a
nasal
Nasal is an adjective referring to the nose, part of human or animal anatomy. It may also be shorthand for the following uses in combination:
* With reference to the human nose:
** Nasal administration, a method of pharmaceutical drug delivery
** ...
pronunciation .
か is the most commonly used interrogatory particle. It is also sometimes used to delimit choices.
が is a Japanese
case marker
In linguistics, a marker is a free or bound morpheme that indicates the grammatical function of the marked word, phrase, or sentence. Most characteristically, markers occur as clitics or inflectional affixes. In analytic languages and agglutinat ...
, as well as a
conjunctive particle. It is used to denote the focus of attention in a sentence, especially to the grammatical subject.
Stroke order
The Hiragana か is made with three
strokes:
# A horizontal line which turns and ends in a hook facing left.
# A curved vertical line that cuts through the first line.
# A small curved line on the right.
The Katakana カ is made with two strokes:
# A horizontal line which turns and ends in a hook facing left.
# A curved vertical line that cuts through the first line.
Other communicative representations
Braille representation
Computer encodings
References
See also
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ka (Kana)
Specific kana