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Gairaigo are Japanese words originating from, or based on, foreign-language, generally Western, terms.These include wasei-eigo (Japanese pseudo-anglicisms).Many of these loanwords derive from Portuguese, due to Portugal's early role in Japanese-Western interaction; Dutch, due to the Netherlands' relationship with Japan amidst the isolationist policy of sakoku during the Edo period; and from ...
letters: Japanese almost always alternates between a consonant and a vowel. Exceptions are digraphs shi and chi, affricate tsu, gemination (two of the same consonant in a row) and palatalization (a consonant followed by the letter y). a macron or circumflex may be used to indicate doubled vowels, eg. Tōkyō; common words: no, o, wa, de, ni
Other uses of letters include abbreviations of spellings of words. Here are some examples: E: 良い /いい (ii; the word for "good" in Japanese). The letter appears in the name of the company e-homes. J: The first letter of "Japan" (日本) as in J1 League, J-Phone. Q: The kanji 九 きゅう ("nine") has the reading kyū.
Written Japanese uses several different scripts: kanji (Chinese characters), 2 sets of kana (phonetic syllabaries) and roman letters. While kana and roman letters can be typed directly into a computer, entering kanji is a more complicated process as there are far more kanji than there are keys on most keyboards.
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. [5] 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 ...
Each kana character corresponds to one sound or whole syllable in the Japanese language, unlike kanji regular script, which corresponds to 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.
Japanese phonology has been affected by the presence of several layers of vocabulary in the language: in addition to native Japanese vocabulary, Japanese has a large amount of Chinese-based vocabulary (used especially to form technical and learned words, playing a similar role to Latin-based vocabulary in English) and loanwords from other ...
This is usually done to "stand out" or to give an "exotic/Japanese feel", e.g. in commercial brand names, such as the fruit juice brand 鲜の每日C, where the の can be read as both 之 zhī, the possessive marker, and as 汁 zhī, meaning "juice". [8]