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Furigana may also be used for foreign names written in kanji. Chinese and Korean names are the most common examples: Chinese names are usually pronounced with Japanese readings and the pronunciation written in hiragana, while Korean names are usually pronounced with Korean readings and the pronunciation written in katakana.
Hiragana originated as simplified forms of similar-sounding Chinese characters. Hiragana character shapes were derived from Chinese cursive script (sōsho). Shown here is a sample of cursive script by 7th century calligrapher Sun Guoting. Note the character 為 (wei), indicated by the red arrow, closely resembles the hiragana character ゐ (wi).
There are a small number of municipalities in Japan whose names are written in hiragana or katakana, together known as kana, rather than kanji as is traditional for Japanese place names. [1] Many city names written in kana have kanji equivalents that are either phonetic manyōgana, or whose kanji are outside of the jōyō kanji.
Because the selection of which hiragana glyphs would become standardized was instituted by the government at the time (rather than as a natural evolution of the writing system) variant kana are effectively unused in modern Japan, save for some limited situations such as signboards, calligraphy, place names, and personal names. [5] Today, those ...
The first, 千 (chi), means "thousand" and the second, 葉 (ba) means "leaves". The name first appears as an ancient kuni no miyatsuko, or regional command office, as the Chiba Kuni no Miyatsuko (千葉国造). The name was adopted by a branch of the Taira clan, which moved to the area in present-day Chiba City in the late Heian period.
In Japanese, each digit/number has at least one native Japanese (), Sino-Japanese (), and English-origin reading.Furthermore, variants of readings may be produced through abbreviation (i.e. rendering ichi as i), consonant voicing (i.e sa as za; see Dakuten and handakuten), gemination (i.e. roku as rokku; see sokuon), vowel lengthening (i.e. ni as nii; see chōonpu), or the insertion of the ...
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.
Officially, among Japanese names there are 291,129 different Japanese surnames (姓, sei), [1] as determined by their kanji, although many of these are pronounced and romanized similarly. Conversely, some surnames written the same in kanji may also be pronounced differently. [ 2 ]