Dakuten and 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 , 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 into being in the Meiji period.

The ''handakuten'' is an innovation by Portuguese Jesuits, who first used it in the ''Rakuyōshū''. These Jesuits had the need to accurately transcribe Japanese sounds, which the Japanese tended to neglect by making no distinction between /h/, /b/ and /p/ in their own writing.

Glyphs

The ''dakuten'' resembles a quotation mark, while the ''handakuten'' is a small circle, similar to a degree sign, both placed at the top right corner of a kana character:
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Both the ''dakuten'' and ''handakuten'' glyphs are drawn identically in hiragana and katakana scripts. The combining characters are rarely used in full-width Japanese characters, as Unicode and all common multibyte Japanese encodings provide precomposed glyphs for all possible ''dakuten'' and ''handakuten'' character combinations in the standard hiragana and katakana ranges. However, combining characters are required in half-width kana, which does not provide any precomposed characters in order to fit within a single byte.

The similarity between the ''dakuten'' and quotation marks (") is not a problem, as written Japanese uses corner brackets (「」).

Phonetic shifts

The following table summarizes the phonetic shifts indicated by the ''dakuten'' and ''handakuten''. Literally, syllables with ''dakuten'' are , while those without are . However, the ''handakuten'' (lit. "half-muddy mark") does not follow this pattern.

Handakuten on ''ka, ki, ku, ke, ko'' (rendered as ) represent the sound of ''ng'' in ''singing'' (), which is an allophone of in many dialects of Japanese. They are not used in normal Japanese writing, but may be used by linguists and in dictionaries (or to represent characters in fiction who speak that way). This is called . Another rare application of ''handakuten'' is on the ''r''-series, to mark them as explicitly ''l'': , and so forth. This is only done in technical or pedantic contexts, as many Japanese cannot tell the difference between ''r'' and ''l''. Additionally, linguists sometimes use to represent in cases when speaker pronounces at the beginning of a word as a moraic nasal.

In katakana only, the ''dakuten'' may also be added to the character ''u'' and a small vowel character to create a sound, as in ヴァ ''va''. However, a hiragana version of this character also exists, with somewhat sporadic compatibility across platforms (). As does not exist in Japanese, this usage applies only to some modern loanwords and remains relatively uncommon, and e.g. Venus is typically transliterated as (''bīnasu'') instead of (''vīnasu''). Japanese speakers, however, pronounce both the same, with or , an occasional allophone of intervocalic .

An even less common method is to add ''dakuten'' to the ''w''-series, reviving the mostly obsolete characters for () and (). is represented by using /u/, as above; becomes despite its normally being silent. Precomposed characters exist for this method as well ( ), although most IMEs do not have a convenient way to enter them.

In Ainu texts, handakuten can be used with the katakana to make it a /ts/ sound, ''ce'' se(which is interchangeable with ), and is used with small ''fu'' to represent a final ''p'', . In addition, handakuten can be combined with either katakana or (''tsu'' and ''to'') to make a u̜sound, or .

In informal writing, ''dakuten'' is occasionally used on vowels to indicate a shocked or strangled articulation; for example, on or . ''Dakuten'' can also be occasionally used with to indicate a guttural hum, growl, or similar sound.

Kana iteration marks

The ''dakuten'' can also be added to hiragana and katakana iteration marks, indicating that the previous kana is repeated with voicing:

Both signs are relatively rare, but can occasionally be found in personal names such as ''Misuzu'' () or brand names such as ''Isuzu'' (いすゞ). In these cases the pronunciation is identical to writing the kana out in full. A longer, multi-character iteration mark called the ''kunojiten'', only used in vertical writing, may also have a ''dakuten'' added.

Other communicative representations

*Representations of Dakuten

*Representations of Handakuten

Voiced syllables and semi-voiced syllables do not have independent names in radiotelephony and are signified by the unvoiced name followed by "ni dakuten" or "ni handakuten".

* Full Braille representation

See also

* Tsu (kana)
* Sokuon

References

External links

*
* and on Japanese Wikipedia

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