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The kana for mu, む/ム, was originally used for the n sound as well, while ん was originally a hentaigana used for both n and mu. In the 1900 Japanese script reforms, hentaigana were officially declared obsolete and ん was officially declared a kana to represent the n sound.
Kana (仮名, false name) or kana (仮字, false character): a syllabary. Magana (真仮名, true kana) or otokogana (男仮名, men's kana): phonetic kanji used as syllabary characters, historically used by men (who were more educated). Man'yōgana (万葉仮名, kana used in the Man'yōshū): the most prominent system of magana.
In the 1900 kana usage reforms, hentaigana (old variant forms of kana) were eliminated, though historical kana orthography (dating to the Heian period, a millennium before) was retained. A separate character for n ん was also prescribed; previously it had been written as む (the same as mu) and ん was a hentaigana for both these sounds.
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
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 or like the nasal vowels of Portuguese or Galician. [citation needed]
Both hiragana and katakana are made in two strokes and represent [nɯ]. They are both derived from the Chinese character 奴. They are both derived from the Chinese character 奴. In the Ainu language , katakana ヌ can be written as small ㇴ to represent a final n, and is interchangeable with the standard katakana ン.
Like every other hiragana, the hiragana の developed from man'yōgana, kanji used for phonetic purposes, written in the highly cursive, flowing grass script style. In the picture on the left, the top shows the kanji 乃 written in the kaisho style, and the centre image is the same kanji written in the sōsho style.
The Japanese radiotelephony alphabet (和文通話表, wabuntsūwahyō, literally "Japanese character telecommunication chart") is a radiotelephony spelling alphabet, similar in purpose to the NATO/ICAO radiotelephony alphabet, but designed to communicate the Japanese kana syllables rather than Latin letters. The alphabet was sponsored by the ...