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35-447: Kana ( 仮名 , Japanese pronunciation: [kana] ) are syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae . In current usage, kana most commonly refers to hiragana and katakana . It can also refer to their ancestor magana ( 真仮名 , lit. 'true kana') , which were Chinese characters used phonetically to transcribe Japanese (e.g. man'yōgana ); and hentaigana , which are historical variants of

70-625: A glossing system to add readings or explanations to Buddhist sutras . Both of these systems were simplified to make writing easier. The shapes of many hiragana resembled the Chinese cursive script , as did those of many katakana the Korean gugyeol , suggesting that the Japanese followed the continental pattern of their neighbors. Kana is traditionally said to have been invented by the Buddhist priest Kūkai in

105-503: A CVV syllable with complex nucleus (i.e. multiple or expressively long vowels), or a CCV syllable with complex onset (i.e. including a glide , C y V, C w V). The limited number of phonemes in Japanese, as well as the relatively rigid syllable structure, makes the kana system a very accurate representation of spoken Japanese . 'Kana' is a compound of kari ( 仮 , 'borrowed; assumed; false') and na ( 名 , 'name') , which eventually collapsed into kanna and ultimately 'kana'. Today it

140-450: A diphthong (bai), though not enough glyphs to distinguish all CV combinations (some distinctions were ignored). The modern script has been expanded to cover all moras, but at the same time reduced to exclude all other syllables. Bimoraic syllables are now written with two letters, as in Japanese: diphthongs are written with the help of V or h V glyphs, and the nasal codas will be written with

175-407: A limited set of characters, such as Wabun code for Morse code telegrams and single-byte digital character encodings such as JIS X 0201 or EBCDIK , likewise dispense with kanji, instead using only katakana. This is not necessary in systems supporting double-byte or variable-width encodings such as Shift JIS , EUC-JP , UTF-8 or UTF-16 . Old Japanese was written entirely in kanji, and

210-438: A meaning . Apart from the five vowels, it is always CV (consonant onset with vowel nucleus ), such as ka , ki , sa , shi , etc., with the sole exception of the C grapheme for nasal codas usually romanised as n . The structure has led some scholars to label the system moraic , instead of syllabic , because it requires the combination of two syllabograms to represent a CVC syllable with coda (e.g. CV n , CV m , CV ng ),

245-455: A poem which uses each kana once. However, hiragana and katakana did not quickly supplant man'yōgana . It was only in 1900 that the present set of kana was codified. All the other forms of hiragana and katakana developed before the 1900 codification are known as hentaigana ( 変体仮名 , "variant kana") . Rules for their usage as per the spelling reforms of 1946, the gendai kana-zukai ( 現代仮名遣い , "present-day kana usage") , which abolished

280-413: A poetry anthology assembled sometime after 759 and the eponym of man'yōgana , exemplifies this phenomenon, where as many as almost twenty kanji were used for the mora ka . The consistency of the kana used was thus dependent on the style of the writer. Hiragana developed as a distinct script from cursive man'yōgana , whereas katakana developed from abbreviated parts of regular script man'yōgana as

315-537: A segmental grapheme for /s/, which can be used both as a coda and in an initial /sC/ consonant cluster. The languages of India and Southeast Asia , as well as the Ethiopian Semitic languages , have a type of alphabet called an abugida or alphasyllabary . In these scripts, unlike in pure syllabaries, syllables starting with the same consonant are largely expressed with graphemes regularly based on common graphical elements. Usually each character representing

350-453: A set of kanji called man'yōgana were first used to represent the phonetic values of grammatical particles and morphemes. As there was no consistent method of sound representation, a phoneme could be represented by multiple kanji, and even those kana's pronunciations differed in whether they were to be read as kungana ( 訓仮名 , "meaning kana") or ongana ( 音仮名 , "sound kana") , making decipherment problematic. The man'yōshū ,

385-416: A syllabary, called a syllabogram , typically represents an (optional) consonant sound (simple onset ) followed by a vowel sound ( nucleus )—that is, a CV (consonant+vowel) or V syllable—but other phonographic mappings, such as CVC, CV- tone, and C (normally nasals at the end of syllables), are also found in syllabaries. A writing system using a syllabary is complete when it covers all syllables in

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420-526: A syllabary. A "pure" English syllabary would require over 10,000 separate glyphs for each possible syllable (e.g., separate glyphs for "half" and "have"). However, such pure systems are rare. A workaround to this problem, common to several syllabaries around the world (including English loanwords in Japanese ), is to add a paragogic dummy vowel, as if the syllable coda were a second syllable: ha-fu for "half" and ha-vu for "have". Dakuten and handakuten Too Many Requests If you report this error to

455-424: A syllable consists of several elements which designate the individual sounds of that syllable. In the 19th century these systems were called syllabics , a term which has survived in the name of Canadian Aboriginal syllabics (also an abugida). In a true syllabary there may be graphic similarity between characters that share a common consonant or vowel sound, but it is not systematic or at all regular. For example,

490-524: A syllable, i.e., initial onset, medial nucleus and final coda, but since onset and coda are optional in at least some languages, there are middle (nucleus), start (onset-nucleus), end (nucleus-coda) and full (onset-nucleus-coda) true syllabograms. Most syllabaries only feature one or two kinds of syllabograms and form other syllables by graphemic rules. Syllabograms, hence syllabaries, are pure , analytic or arbitrary if they do not share graphic similarities that correspond to phonic similarities, e.g.

525-555: A tool for children), there can be no word-by-word collation; all collation is kana-by-kana. The hiragana range in Unicode is U+3040 ... U+309F, and the katakana range is U+30A0 ... U+30FF. The obsolete and rare characters ( wi and we ) also have their proper code points. Characters U+3095 and U+3096 are hiragana small ka and small ke , respectively. U+30F5 and U+30F6 are their katakana equivalents. Characters U+3099 and U+309A are combining dakuten and handakuten , which correspond to

560-528: Is a ligature of koto ( コト ), also found in vertical writing. Additionally, there are halfwidth equivalents to the standard fullwidth katakana. These are encoded within the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block (U+FF00–U+FFEF), starting at U+FF65 and ending at U+FF9F (characters U+FF61–U+FF64 are halfwidth punctuation marks): There is also a small "Katakana Phonetic Extensions" range (U+31F0 ... U+31FF), which includes some additional small kana characters for writing

595-466: Is a separate glyph for every consonant-vowel-tone combination (CVT) in the language (apart from one tone which is indicated with a diacritic). Few syllabaries have glyphs for syllables that are not monomoraic, and those that once did have simplified over time to eliminate that complexity. For example, the Vai syllabary originally had separate glyphs for syllables ending in a coda (doŋ), a long vowel (soo), or

630-597: 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. Kana can be written in small form above or next to lesser-known kanji in order to show pronunciation; this is called furigana . Furigana is used most widely in children's or learners' books. Literature for young children who do not yet know kanji may dispense with it altogether and instead use hiragana combined with spaces. Systems supporting only

665-426: Is generally assumed that 'kana' were considered "false" kanji due to their purely phonetic nature, as opposed to mana ( 真名 ) which were "true" kanji used for their meanings. Yet originally, mana and kana were purely calligraphic terms with mana referring to Chinese characters written in the regular script ( kaisho ) and kana referring to those written in the cursive ( sōsho ) style (see hiragana ). It

700-480: Is stylistic. Usually, hiragana is the default syllabary, and katakana is used in certain special cases. Hiragana is used to write native Japanese words with no kanji representation (or whose kanji is thought obscure or difficult), as well as grammatical elements such as particles and inflections ( okurigana ). 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

735-403: Is therefore more correctly called a moraic writing system, with syllables consisting of two moras corresponding to two kana symbols. Languages that use syllabaries today tend to have simple phonotactics , with a predominance of monomoraic (CV) syllables. For example, the modern Yi script is used to write languages that have no diphthongs or syllable codas; unusually among syllabaries, there

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770-643: The Ainu language . Further small kana characters are present in the "Small Kana Extension" block. Unicode also includes "Katakana letter archaic E" (U+1B000), as well as 255 archaic Hiragana , in the Kana Supplement block. It also includes a further 31 archaic Hiragana in the Kana Extended-A block. The Kana Extended-B block was added in September, 2021 with the release of version 14.0: Syllabary A symbol in

805-727: The Yi languages of eastern Asia, the English-based creole language Ndyuka , Xiangnan Tuhua , and the ancient language Mycenaean Greek ( Linear B ). In addition, the undecoded Cretan Linear A is also believed by some to be a syllabic script, though this is not proven. Chinese characters , the cuneiform script used for Sumerian , Akkadian and other languages, and the former Maya script are largely syllabic in nature, although based on logograms . They are therefore sometimes referred to as logosyllabic . The contemporary Japanese language uses two syllabaries together called kana (in addition to

840-403: The characters for ka ke ko in Japanese hiragana – か け こ – have no similarity to indicate their common /k/ sound. Compare this with Devanagari script, an abugida, where the characters for ka ke ko are क के को respectively. English , along with many other Indo-European languages like German and Russian, allows for complex syllable structures, making it cumbersome to write English words with

875-478: The corresponding spoken language without requiring complex orthographic / graphemic rules, like implicit codas ( ⟨C 1 V⟩ ⇒ /C 1 VC 2 /), silent vowels ( ⟨C 1 V 1 +C 2 V 2 ⟩ ⇒ /C 1 V 1 C 2 /) or echo vowels ( ⟨C 1 V 1 +C 2 V 1 ⟩ ⇒ /C 1 V 1 C 2 /). This loosely corresponds to shallow orthographies in alphabetic writing systems. True syllabograms are those that encompass all parts of

910-459: The corresponding unvoiced columns ( k , s , t and h ) and the voicing mark, dakuten . Syllables beginning with [p] are spelled with kana from the h column and the half-voicing mark, handakuten . Syllables beginning with palatalized consonants are spelled with one of the seven consonantal kana from the i row followed by small ya , yu or yo . These digraphs are called yōon . The difference in usage between hiragana and katakana

945-444: The glyph for ŋ , which can form a syllable of its own in Vai. In Linear B , which was used to transcribe Mycenaean Greek , a language with complex syllables, complex consonant onsets were either written with two glyphs or simplified to one, while codas were generally ignored, e.g., ko-no-so for Κνωσός Knōsos , pe-ma for σπέρμα sperma. The Cherokee syllabary generally uses dummy vowels for coda consonants, but also has

980-491: The kana for wi (ゐ・ヰ), we (ゑ・ヱ), and wo (を・ヲ) (except that the last was reserved as the accusative particle). Kana are the basis for collation in Japanese. They are taken in the order given by the gojūon (あ い う え お ... わ を ん), though iroha (い ろ は に ほ へ と ... せ す (ん)) ordering is used for enumeration in some circumstances. Dictionaries differ in the sequence order for long/short vowel distinction, small tsu and diacritics. As Japanese does not use word spaces (except as

1015-475: The ninth century. Kūkai certainly brought the Siddhaṃ script of India home on his return from China in 806; his interest in the sacred aspects of speech and writing led him to the conclusion that Japanese would be better represented by a phonetic alphabet than by the kanji which had been used up to that point. The modern arrangement of kana reflects that of Siddhaṃ, but the traditional iroha arrangement follows

1050-422: The non-syllabic systems kanji and romaji ), namely hiragana and katakana , which were developed around 700. Because Japanese uses mainly CV (consonant + vowel) syllables, a syllabary is well suited to write the language. As in many syllabaries, vowel sequences and final consonants are written with separate glyphs, so that both atta and kaita are written with three kana: あった ( a-t-ta ) and かいた ( ka-i-ta ). It

1085-631: The now-standard hiragana. 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 ruby text for Chinese characters in Taiwan when it was under Japanese rule . Each kana character corresponds to one sound or whole syllable in the Japanese language, unlike kanji regular script , which corresponds to

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1120-411: The spacing characters U+309B and U+309C. U+309D is the hiragana iteration mark , used to repeat a previous hiragana. U+309E is the voiced hiragana iteration mark, which stands in for the previous hiragana but with the consonant voiced ( k becomes g , h becomes b , etc.). U+30FD and U+30FE are the katakana iteration marks. U+309F is a ligature of yori ( より ) sometimes used in vertical writing. U+30FF

1155-502: The symbol for ka does not resemble in any predictable way the symbol for ki , nor the symbol for a . Otherwise, they are synthetic , if they vary by onset, rime, nucleus or coda, or systematic , if they vary by all of them. Some scholars, e.g., Daniels, reserve the general term for analytic syllabaries and invent other terms ( abugida , abjad ) as necessary. Some systems provide katakana language conversion. Languages that use syllabic writing include Japanese , Cherokee , Vai ,

1190-453: The term 'kana' is now commonly understood as hiragana and katakana, it actually has broader application as listed below: The following table reads, in gojūon order, as a , i , u , e , o (down first column), then ka , ki , ku , ke , ko (down second column), and so on. n appears on its own at the end. Asterisks mark unused combinations. Syllables beginning with the voiced consonants [g], [z], [d] and [b] are spelled with kana from

1225-428: Was not until the 18th century that the early-nationalist kokugaku movement which wanted to move away from Sinocentric academia began to reanalyze the script from a phonological point of view. In the following centuries, contrary to the traditional Sinocentric view, kana began to be considered a national Japanese writing system that was distinct from Chinese characters, which is the dominant view today. Although

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