Misplaced Pages

#171828

92-587: Katakana ( 片仮名 、 カタカナ , IPA: [katakaꜜna, kataꜜkana] ) 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

184-434: A 5×10 grid ( gojūon , 五十音, literally "fifty sounds"), as shown in the adjacent table, read ア ( a ) , イ ( i ) , ウ ( u ) , エ ( e ) , オ ( o ) , カ ( ka ) , キ ( ki ) , ク ( ku ) , ケ ( ke ) , コ ( ko ) and so on. The gojūon inherits its vowel and consonant order from Sanskrit practice. In vertical text contexts, which used to be the default case, the grid is usually presented as 10 columns by 5 rows, with vowels on

276-523: A chance to practice reading and writing kana with meaningful words. This was the approach taken by the influential American linguistics scholar Eleanor Harz Jorden in Japanese: The Written Language (parallel to Japanese: The Spoken Language ). Katakana is commonly used by Japanese linguists to write the Ainu language . In Ainu katakana usage, the consonant that comes at the end of a syllable

368-529: A common typographic practice among both British and U.S. publishers to capitalise significant words (and in the United States, this is often applied to headings, too). This family of typographic conventions is usually called title case . For example, R. M. Ritter's Oxford Manual of Style (2002) suggests capitalising "the first word and all nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, but generally not articles, conjunctions and short prepositions". This

460-450: 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

552-444: A handwritten sticky note , may not bother to follow the conventions concerning capitalisation, but that is because its users usually do not expect it to be formal. Similar orthographic and graphostylistic conventions are used for emphasis or following language-specific or other rules, including: In English, a variety of case styles are used in various circumstances: In English-language publications, various conventions are used for

644-458: A marker to indicate the beginning of a line of verse independent of any grammatical feature. In political writing, parody and satire, the unexpected emphasis afforded by otherwise ill-advised capitalisation is often used to great stylistic effect, such as in the case of George Orwell's Big Brother . Other languages vary in their use of capitals. For example, in German all nouns are capitalised (this

736-498: A more general sense. It can also be seen as customary to capitalise any word – in some contexts even a pronoun  – referring to the deity of a monotheistic religion . Other words normally start with a lower-case letter. There are, however, situations where further capitalisation may be used to give added emphasis, for example in headings and publication titles (see below). In some traditional forms of poetry, capitalisation has conventionally been used as

828-483: A primary alteration; most often it voices the consonant: k → g , s → z , t → d and h → b ; for example, カ ( ka ) becomes ガ ( ga ) . Secondary alteration, where possible, is shown by a circular handakuten : h → p ; For example; ハ ( ha ) becomes パ ( pa ) . Diacritics, though used for over a thousand years, only became mandatory in the Japanese writing system in the second half of the 20th century. Their application

920-537: 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

1012-520: A sentence are also sometimes written in katakana, mirroring the usage of italics in European languages. 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 was also used for telegrams in Japan before 1988, and for computer systems – before

SECTION 10

#1732851800172

1104-478: A spelling mistake (since minuscule is derived from the word minus ), but is now so common that some dictionaries tend to accept it as a non-standard or variant spelling. Miniscule is still less likely, however, to be used in reference to lower-case letters. The glyphs of lowercase letters can resemble smaller forms of the uppercase glyphs restricted to the baseband (e.g. "C/c" and "S/s", cf. small caps ) or can look hardly related (e.g. "D/d" and "G/g"). Here

1196-536: A syllabary is complete when it covers all syllables in 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

1288-486: 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". Bicameral script Letter case

1380-424: 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,

1472-524: 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.

1564-573: A vowel, but this is not exactly the case (and never has been). Existing schemes for the romanization of Japanese either are based on the systematic nature of the script, e.g. nihon-shiki チ ti , or they apply some Western graphotactics , usually the English one, to the common Japanese pronunciation of the kana signs, e.g. Hepburn-shiki チ chi . Both approaches conceal the fact, though, that many consonant-based katakana signs, especially those canonically ending in u , can be used in coda position, too, where

1656-503: Is a comparison of the upper and lower case variants of each letter included in the English alphabet (the exact representation will vary according to the typeface and font used): (Some lowercase letters have variations e.g. a/ɑ.) Typographically , the basic difference between the majuscules and minuscules is not that the majuscules are big and minuscules small, but that the majuscules generally are of uniform height (although, depending on

1748-466: 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

1840-543: Is also known as spinal case , param case , Lisp case in reference to the Lisp programming language , or dash case (or illustratively as kebab-case , looking similar to the skewer that sticks through a kebab ). If every word is capitalised, the style is known as train case ( TRAIN-CASE ). In CSS , all property names and most keyword values are primarily formatted in kebab case. "tHeqUicKBrOWnFoXJUmpsoVeRThElAzydOG" Mixed case with no semantic or syntactic significance to

1932-419: Is also used for this purpose). 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, difficult-to-read kanji such as 癌 gan (" cancer ") are often written in katakana or hiragana. Katakana

SECTION 20

#1732851800172

2024-615: Is also used for traditional musical notations, as in the Tozan- ryū of shakuhachi , and in sankyoku ensembles with koto , shamisen and shakuhachi . Some instructors teaching Japanese as a foreign language "introduce katakana after the students have learned to read and write sentences in hiragana without difficulty and know the rules." Most students who have learned hiragana "do not have great difficulty in memorizing" katakana as well. Other instructors introduce katakana first, because these are used with loanwords. This gives students

2116-409: Is an old form of emphasis , similar to the more modern practice of using a larger or boldface font for titles. The rules which prescribe which words to capitalise are not based on any grammatically inherent correct–incorrect distinction and are not universally standardised; they differ between style guides, although most style guides tend to follow a few strong conventions, as follows: Title case

2208-417: Is capitalised, as are all proper nouns . Capitalisation in English, in terms of the general orthographic rules independent of context (e.g. title vs. heading vs. text), is universally standardised for formal writing. Capital letters are used as the first letter of a sentence, a proper noun, or a proper adjective . The names of the days of the week and the names of the months are also capitalised, as are

2300-424: Is capitalised. Nevertheless, the name of the unit, if spelled out, is always considered a common noun and written accordingly in lower case. For example: For the purpose of clarity, the symbol for litre can optionally be written in upper case even though the name is not derived from a proper noun. For example, "one litre" may be written as: The letter case of a prefix symbol is determined independently of

2392-399: Is conventional to use one case only. For example, engineering design drawings are typically labelled entirely in uppercase letters, which are easier to distinguish individually than the lowercase when space restrictions require very small lettering. In mathematics , on the other hand, uppercase and lower case letters denote generally different mathematical objects , which may be related when

2484-501: Is generally applied in a mixed-case fashion, with both upper and lowercase letters appearing in a given piece of text for legibility. The choice of case is often denoted by the grammar of a language or by the conventions of a particular discipline. In orthography , the uppercase is reserved for special purposes, such as the first letter of a sentence or of a proper noun (called capitalisation, or capitalised words), which makes lowercase more common in regular text. In some contexts, it

2576-431: Is mainly used over SMTP and NNTP . Syllabary A symbol in 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

2668-904: Is no longer applicable to kana) . The adjacent table shows the origins of each katakana: the red markings of the original Chinese character (used as man'yōgana ) eventually became each corresponding symbol. Katakana is also heavily influenced by Sanskrit due to the original creators having travelled and worked with Indian Buddhists based in East Asia during the era. Official documents of the Empire of Japan were written exclusively with kyūjitai and katakana. Katakana have variant forms. For example, [REDACTED] (ネ) and [REDACTED] (ヰ). However, katakana's variant forms are fewer than hiragana's. Katakana's choices of man'yōgana segments had stabilized early on and established – with few exceptions – an unambiguous phonemic orthography (one symbol per sound) long before

2760-422: Is no technical requirement to do so – e.g., Sun Microsystems ' naming of a windowing system NeWS . Illustrative naming of the style is, naturally, random: stUdlY cAps , StUdLy CaPs , etc.. In the character sets developed for computing , each upper- and lower-case letter is encoded as a separate character. In order to enable case folding and case conversion, the software needs to link together

2852-405: Is not available. Acronyms (and particularly initialisms) are often written in all-caps , depending on various factors . Capitalisation is the writing of a word with its first letter in uppercase and the remaining letters in lowercase. Capitalisation rules vary by language and are often quite complex, but in most modern languages that have capitalisation, the first word of every sentence

Katakana - Misplaced Pages Continue

2944-845: Is removed and spaces are replaced by single underscores . Normally the letters share the same case (e.g. "UPPER_CASE_EMBEDDED_UNDERSCORE" or "lower_case_embedded_underscore") but the case can be mixed, as in OCaml variant constructors (e.g. "Upper_then_lowercase"). The style may also be called pothole case , especially in Python programming, in which this convention is often used for naming variables. Illustratively, it may be rendered snake_case , pothole_case , etc.. When all-upper-case, it may be referred to as screaming snake case (or SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE ) or hazard case . "the-quick-brown-fox-jumps-over-the-lazy-dog" Similar to snake case, above, except hyphens rather than underscores are used to replace spaces. It

3036-489: Is represented as ベッド ( beddo ). The sokuon also sometimes appears at the end of utterances, where it denotes a glottal stop . However, it cannot be used to double the na , ni , nu , ne , no syllables' consonants; to double these, the singular n (ン) is added in front of the syllable. 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 ). Both katakana and hiragana usually spell native long vowels with

3128-486: Is represented by a small version of a katakana that corresponds to that final consonant followed by a vowel (for details of which vowel, please see the table at Ainu language § Special katakana for the Ainu language ). For instance, the Ainu word up is represented by ウㇷ゚ ( ウ プ [ u followed by small pu ]). Ainu also uses three handakuten modified katakana: セ゚ ( [tse] ) and either ツ゚ or ト゚ ( [tu̜] ). In Unicode,

3220-561: Is sentence-style capitalisation in headlines, i.e. capitalisation follows the same rules that apply for sentences. This convention is usually called sentence case . It may also be applied to publication titles, especially in bibliographic references and library catalogues. An example of a global publisher whose English-language house style prescribes sentence-case titles and headings is the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). For publication titles it is, however,

3312-426: Is strictly limited in proper writing systems, but may be more extensive in academic transcriptions. Furthermore, some characters may have special semantics when used in smaller sizes after a normal one (see below), but this does not make the script truly bicameral . The layout of the gojūon table promotes a systematic view of kana syllabograms as being always pronounced with the same single consonant followed by

3404-418: Is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally majuscule ) and smaller lowercase (more formally minuscule ) in the written representation of certain languages. The writing systems that distinguish between the upper- and lowercase have two parallel sets of letters: each in the majuscule set has a counterpart in the minuscule set. Some counterpart letters have

3496-403: 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

3588-424: Is widely used in many English-language publications, especially in the United States. However, its conventions are sometimes not followed strictly – especially in informal writing. In creative typography, such as music record covers and other artistic material, all styles are commonly encountered, including all-lowercase letters and special case styles, such as studly caps (see below). For example, in

3680-407: Is written トヨタ . As these are common family names, Suzuki being the second most common in Japan, using katakana helps distinguish company names from surnames in writing. Katakana are commonly used on signs, advertisements, and hoardings (i.e., billboards ), for example, ココ ( koko , "here") , ゴミ ( gomi , "trash") , or メガネ ( megane , "glasses") . Words the writer wishes to emphasize in

3772-714: The Cabinet of Japan 's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology . Katakana combinations with beige backgrounds are suggested by the American National Standards Institute and the British Standards Institution as possible uses. Ones with purple backgrounds appear on the 1974 version of the Hyōjun-shiki formatting. Pronunciations are shown in Hepburn romanization . Katakana

Katakana - Misplaced Pages Continue

3864-727: 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

3956-520: The wordmarks of video games it is not uncommon to use stylised upper-case letters at the beginning and end of a title, with the intermediate letters in small caps or lower case (e.g., ArcaniA , ArmA , and DmC ). Single-word proper nouns are capitalised in formal written English, unless the name is intentionally stylised to break this rule (such as e e cummings , bell hooks , eden ahbez , and danah boyd ). Multi-word proper nouns include names of organisations, publications, and people. Often

4048-553: The zhùyīn fúhào characters, with kana serving as initials, vowel medials and consonant finals, marked with tonal marks. A dot below the initial kana represents aspirated consonants, and チ, ツ, サ, セ, ソ, ウ and オ with a superpositional bar represent sounds found only in Taiwanese. Katakana is used as a phonetic guide for the Okinawan language , unlike the various other systems to represent Okinawan, which use hiragana with extensions. The system

4140-400: 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 , as a species, is written ヒト ( hito ) , rather than its kanji 人 . Katakana are often (but not always) used for transcription of Japanese company names. For example, Suzuki is written スズキ , and Toyota

4232-514: The 1900 script regularization. The following table shows the method for writing each katakana character. It is arranged in a traditional manner, where characters are organized by the sounds that make them up. The numbers and arrows indicate the stroke order and direction, respectively. In addition to fonts intended for Japanese text and Unicode catch-all fonts (like Arial Unicode MS ), many fonts intended for Chinese (such as MS Song) and Korean (such as Batang) also include katakana. In addition to

4324-417: 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 like English m , n or ng ( [ ŋ ] ) or like the nasal vowels of Portuguese or Galician . In contrast to

4416-838: The Katakana Phonetic Extensions block ( U+31F0–U+31FF ) exists for Ainu language support. These characters are used for the Ainu language only. Taiwanese kana (タイ [REDACTED] ヲァヌ [REDACTED] ギイ [REDACTED] カア [REDACTED] ビェン [REDACTED] ) is a katakana-based writing system once used to write Holo Taiwanese , when Taiwan was under Japanese rule . It functioned as a phonetic guide for Chinese characters , much like furigana in Japanese or Zhùyīn fúhào in Chinese. There were similar systems for other languages in Taiwan as well, including Hakka and Formosan languages . Unlike Japanese or Ainu, Taiwanese kana are used similarly to

4508-399: The addition of a second vowel kana. However, in foreign loanwords, katakana instead uses a vowel extender mark, called a chōonpu ("long vowel mark"). This is a short line (ー) following the direction of the text, horizontal for yokogaki (horizontal text), and vertical for tategaki (vertical text). For example, メール mēru is the gairaigo for e-mail taken from the English word "mail";

4600-564: The capitalisation of the following internal letter or word, for example "Mac" in Celtic names and "Al" in Arabic names. In the International System of Units (SI), a letter usually has different meanings in upper and lower case when used as a unit symbol. Generally, unit symbols are written in lower case, but if the name of the unit is derived from a proper noun, the first letter of the symbol

4692-414: The capitalisation of words in publication titles and headlines , including chapter and section headings. The rules differ substantially between individual house styles. The convention followed by many British publishers (including scientific publishers like Nature and New Scientist , magazines like The Economist , and newspapers like The Guardian and The Times ) and many U.S. newspapers

SECTION 50

#1732851800172

4784-446: The case is usually known as lower camel case or dromedary case (illustratively: dromedaryCase ). This format has become popular in the branding of information technology products and services, with an initial "i" meaning " Internet " or "intelligent", as in iPod , or an initial "e" meaning "electronic", as in email (electronic mail) or e-commerce (electronic commerce). "the_quick_brown_fox_jumps_over_the_lazy_dog" Punctuation

4876-403: 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

4968-418: The code too abstract and overloaded for the common programmer to understand. Understandably then, such coding conventions are highly subjective , and can lead to rather opinionated debate, such as in the case of editor wars , or those about indent style . Capitalisation is no exception. "theQuickBrownFoxJumpsOverTheLazyDog" or "TheQuickBrownFoxJumpsOverTheLazyDog" Spaces and punctuation are removed and

5060-463: The computer equipment of the day. This space is narrower than the square space traditionally occupied by Japanese characters, hence the name "half-width". In this scheme, diacritics (dakuten and handakuten) are separate characters. When originally devised, the half-width katakana were represented by a single byte each, as in JIS X 0201, again in line with the capabilities of contemporary computer technology. In

5152-404: The context of an imperative, strongly typed language. The third supports the macro facilities of LISP, and its tendency to view programs and data minimalistically, and as interchangeable. The fourth idiom needs much less syntactic sugar overall, because much of the semantics are implied, but because of its brevity and so lack of the need for capitalization or multipart words at all, might also make

5244-460: The first letter of each word is capitalised. If this includes the first letter of the first word (CamelCase, " PowerPoint ", "TheQuick...", etc.), the case is sometimes called upper camel case (or, illustratively, CamelCase ), Pascal case in reference to the Pascal programming language or bumpy case . When the first letter of the first word is lowercase (" iPod ", " eBay ", "theQuickBrownFox..."),

5336-437: The first-person pronoun "I" and the vocative particle " O ". There are a few pairs of words of different meanings whose only difference is capitalisation of the first letter. Honorifics and personal titles showing rank or prestige are capitalised when used together with the name of the person (for example, "Mr. Smith", "Bishop Gorman", "Professor Moore") or as a direct address, but normally not when used alone and in

5428-634: The full list. In modern Japanese, katakana is most often used for transcription of words from foreign languages or loanwords (other than words historically imported from Chinese), called gairaigo . For example, "ice cream" is written アイスクリーム ( aisukurīmu ) . Similarly, katakana is usually used for country names, foreign places, and foreign personal names. For example, the United States is usually referred to as アメリカ ( Amerika ) , rather than in its ateji kanji spelling of 亜米利加 ( Amerika ) . Katakana are also used for onomatopoeia, words used to represent sounds – for example, ピンポン ( pinpon ) ,

5520-444: 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

5612-701: 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 English; specifically, it is used for transcription of foreign-language words into Japanese and the writing of loan words (collectively gairaigo ); for emphasis; to represent onomatopoeia ; for technical and scientific terms; and for names of plants, animals, minerals and often Japanese companies. Katakana evolved from Japanese Buddhist monks transliterating Chinese texts into Japanese. The complete katakana script consists of 48 characters, not counting functional and diacritic marks: These are conceived as

SECTION 60

#1732851800172

5704-461: The introduction of multibyte characters – in the 1980s. Most computers of 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 varieties that are borrowed directly use katakana instead. The very common Chinese loanword rāmen , written in katakana as ラーメン , is rarely written with its kanji ( 拉麺 ). There are rare instances where

5796-474: The kanji 人 has a Japanese pronunciation, written in hiragana as ひと hito (person), as well as a Chinese derived pronunciation, written in katakana as ジン jin (used to denote groups of people). Katakana is 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

5888-528: The late 1970s, two-byte character sets such as JIS X 0208 were introduced to support the full range of Japanese characters, including katakana, hiragana and kanji. Their display forms were designed to fit into an approximately square array of pixels, hence the name "full-width". For backward compatibility, separate support for half-width katakana has continued to be available in modern multi-byte encoding schemes such as Unicode, by having two separate blocks of characters – one displayed as usual (full-width) katakana,

5980-564: The majuscule scripts used in the Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209 , or the Book of Kells ). By virtue of their visual impact, this made the term majuscule an apt descriptor for what much later came to be more commonly referred to as uppercase letters. Minuscule refers to lower-case letters . The word is often spelled miniscule , by association with the unrelated word miniature and the prefix mini- . That has traditionally been regarded as

6072-433: The modern written Georgian language does not distinguish case. All other writing systems make no distinction between majuscules and minuscules – a system called unicameral script or unicase . This includes most syllabic and other non-alphabetic scripts. In scripts with a case distinction, lowercase is generally used for the majority of text; capitals are used for capitalisation and emphasis when bold

6164-732: The name, though there is some variation in this. With personal names , this practice can vary (sometimes all words are capitalised, regardless of length or function), but is not limited to English names. Examples include the English names Tamar of Georgia and Catherine the Great , " van " and "der" in Dutch names , " von " and "zu" in German , "de", "los", and "y" in Spanish names , "de" or "d'" in French names , and "ibn" in Arabic names . Some surname prefixes also affect

6256-455: The nasal ン ( n ). This can appear in several positions, most often next to the N signs or, because it developed from one of many mu hentaigana , below the u column. It may also be appended to the vowel row or the a column. Here, it is shown in a table of its own. The script includes two diacritic marks placed at the upper right of the base character that change the initial sound of a syllabogram. A double dot, called dakuten , indicates

6348-422: 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

6440-667: The ones with descenders. In addition, with old-style numerals still used by some traditional or classical fonts, 6 and 8 make up the ascender set, and 3, 4, 5, 7 , and 9 the descender set. A minority of writing systems use two separate cases. Such writing systems are called bicameral scripts . These scripts include the Latin , Cyrillic , Greek , Coptic , Armenian , Glagolitic , Adlam , Warang Citi , Garay , Zaghawa , Osage , Vithkuqi , and Deseret scripts. Languages written in these scripts use letter cases as an aid to clarity. The Georgian alphabet has several variants, and there were attempts to use them as different cases, but

6532-408: 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 alternatively be written as 珈琲 . This kanji usage is occasionally employed by coffee manufacturers or coffee shops for novelty. Katakana is used to indicate the on'yomi (Chinese-derived readings) of a kanji in a kanji dictionary . For instance,

6624-436: The original. Katakana are also sometimes used to indicate words being spoken in a foreign or otherwise unusual accent. 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 typical hiragana こんにちは . Some Japanese personal names are written in katakana. This was more common in the past, hence elderly women often have katakana names. This

6716-634: The other displayed as half-width katakana. Although often said to be obsolete, the half-width katakana are still used in many systems and encodings. For example, the titles of mini discs can only be entered in ASCII or half-width katakana, and half-width katakana are commonly used in computerized cash register displays, on shop receipts, and Japanese digital television and DVD subtitles. Several popular Japanese encodings such as EUC-JP , Unicode and Shift JIS have half-width katakana code as well as full-width. By contrast, ISO-2022-JP has no half-width katakana, and

6808-409: The right hand side and ア ( a ) on top. Katakana glyphs in the same row or column do not share common graphic characteristics. Three of the syllabograms to be expected, yi , ye and wu , may have been used idiosyncratically with varying glyphs , but never became conventional in any language and are not present at all in modern Japanese. The 50-sound table is often amended with an extra character,

6900-467: The rules for "title case" (described in the previous section) are applied to these names, so that non-initial articles, conjunctions, and short prepositions are lowercase, and all other words are uppercase. For example, the short preposition "of" and the article "the" are lowercase in "Steering Committee of the Finance Department". Usually only capitalised words are used to form an acronym variant of

6992-402: The same shape, and differ only in size (e.g. ⟨C, c⟩ or ⟨S, s⟩ ), but for others the shapes are different (e.g., ⟨A, a⟩ or ⟨G, g⟩ ). The two case variants are alternative representations of the same letter: they have the same name and pronunciation and are typically treated identically when sorting in alphabetical order . Letter case

7084-511: The shallow drawers called type cases used to hold the movable type for letterpress printing . Traditionally, the capital letters were stored in a separate shallow tray or "case" that was located above the case that held the small letters. Majuscule ( / ˈ m æ dʒ ə s k juː l / , less commonly / m ə ˈ dʒ ʌ s k juː l / ), for palaeographers , is technically any script whose letters have very few or very short ascenders and descenders, or none at all (for example,

7176-488: The slant and stroke shape. These differences in slant and shape are more prominent when written with an ink brush . Notes Using small versions of the five vowel kana, many digraphs have been devised, mainly to represent the sounds in words of other languages. Digraphs with orange backgrounds are the general ones used for loanwords or foreign places or names, and those with blue backgrounds are used for more accurate transliterations of foreign sounds, both suggested by

7268-496: The small y kana is called yōon . A character called a sokuon , which is visually identical to a small tsu ッ, indicates that the following consonant is geminated (doubled). This is represented in rōmaji by doubling the consonant that follows the sokuon . In Japanese this is an important distinction in pronunciation; for example, compare サカ saka "hill" with サッカ sakka "author". Geminated consonants are common in transliterations of foreign loanwords; for example, English "bed"

7360-502: 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 ,

7452-561: The tokens, such as function and variable names start to multiply in complex software development , and there is still a need to keep the source code human-readable, Naming conventions make this possible. So for example, a function dealing with matrix multiplication might formally be called: In each case, the capitalisation or lack thereof supports a different function. In the first, FORTRAN compatibility requires case-insensitive naming and short function names. The second supports easily discernible function and argument names and types, within

7544-405: The two cases of the same letter are used; for example, x may denote an element of a set X . The terms upper case and lower case may be written as two consecutive words, connected with a hyphen ( upper-case and lower-case  – particularly if they pre-modify another noun), or as a single word ( uppercase and lowercase ). These terms originated from the common layouts of

7636-425: The typeface, there may be some exceptions, particularly with Q and sometimes J having a descending element; also, various diacritics can add to the normal height of a letter). There is more variation in the height of the minuscules, as some of them have parts higher ( ascenders ) or lower ( descenders ) than the typical size. Normally, b, d, f, h, k, l, t are the letters with ascenders, and g, j, p, q, y are

7728-596: The unit symbol to which it is attached. Lower case is used for all submultiple prefix symbols and the small multiple prefix symbols up to "k" (for kilo , meaning 10 = 1000 multiplier), whereas upper case is used for larger multipliers: Some case styles are not used in standard English, but are common in computer programming , product branding , or other specialised fields. The usage derives from how programming languages are parsed , programmatically. They generally separate their syntactic tokens by simple whitespace , including space characters , tabs , and newlines . When

7820-445: The use of the capitals. Sometimes only vowels are upper case, at other times upper and lower case are alternated, but often it is simply random. The name comes from the sarcastic or ironic implication that it was used in an attempt by the writer to convey their own coolness ( studliness ). It is also used to mock the violation of standard English case conventions by marketers in the naming of computer software packages, even when there

7912-450: The usual full-width ( 全角 , zenkaku ) display forms of characters, katakana has a second form, half-width ( 半角 , hankaku ) . The half-width forms were originally associated with the JIS X 0201 encoding. Although their display form is not specified in the standard, in practice they were designed to fit into the same rectangle of pixels as Roman letters to enable easy implementation on

8004-443: The vowel is unvoiced and therefore barely perceptible. Of the 48 katakana syllabograms described above, only 46 are used in modern Japanese, and one of these is preserved for only a single use: A small version of the katakana for ya , yu or yo (ャ, ュ or ョ, respectively) may be added to katakana ending in i . This changes the i vowel sound to a glide ( palatalization ) to a , u or o , e.g. キャ ( ki + ya ) /kja/. Addition of

8096-722: The ー lengthens the e . There are some exceptions, such as ローソク ( rōsoku ( 蝋燭 , "candle") ) or ケータイ ( kētai ( 携帯 , "mobile phone") ), where Japanese words written in katakana use the elongation mark , too. Standard and voiced iteration marks are written in katakana as ヽ and ヾ, respectively. Small versions of the five vowel kana are sometimes used to represent trailing off sounds (ハァ haa , ネェ nee ), but in katakana they are more often used in yōon-like extended digraphs designed to represent phonemes not present in Japanese; examples include チェ ( che ) in チェンジ chenji ("change"), ファ ( fa ) in ファミリー famirī ("family") and ウィ ( wi ) and ディ ( di ) in ウィキペディア Misplaced Pages ; see below for

8188-457: Was developed in the 9th century (during the early Heian period ) by Buddhist monks in Nara in order to transliterate texts and works of arts from India, by taking parts of man'yōgana characters as a form of shorthand, hence this kana is so-called kata ( 片 , "partial, fragmented") . For example, ka ( カ ) comes from the left side of ka ( 加 , lit. "increase", but the original meaning

8280-649: Was devised by the Okinawa Center of Language Study of the University of the Ryukyus . It uses many extensions and yōon to show the many non-Japanese sounds of Okinawan. This is a table of katakana together with their Hepburn romanization and rough IPA transcription for their use in Japanese. Katakana with dakuten or handakuten follow the gojūon kana without them. Characters shi シ , tsu ツ , so ソ , and n ン look very similar in print except for

8372-720: Was particularly common among women in the Meiji and Taishō periods, when many poor, illiterate parents were unwilling to pay a scholar to give their daughters names in kanji. Katakana is also used to denote the fact that a character is speaking a foreign language, and what is displayed in katakana is only the Japanese "translation" of their words. Some frequently used words may also be written in katakana in dialogs to convey an informal, conversational tone. Some examples include マンガ ("manga"), アイツ aitsu ("that guy or girl; he/him; she/her"), バカ baka ("fool"), etc. Words with difficult-to-read kanji are sometimes written in katakana (hiragana

8464-630: Was previously common in English as well, mainly in the 17th and 18th centuries), while in Romance and most other European languages the names of the days of the week, the names of the months, and adjectives of nationality, religion, and so on normally begin with a lower-case letter. On the other hand, in some languages it is customary to capitalise formal polite pronouns , for example De , Dem ( Danish ), Sie , Ihnen (German), and Vd or Ud (short for usted in Spanish ). Informal communication, such as texting , instant messaging or

#171828