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The phoneme /v/ in Japanese is used properly only in loanwords, where the preference for either /v/ or /b/ depends on many factors; in general, words that are perceived to be in common use tend toward /b/. Polish: fał; Portuguese: vê; Spanish: uve is recommended, but ve is traditional.
As /v/ does not exist in Japanese, this usage applies only to some modern loanwords and remains relatively uncommon, and e.g. Venus is typically transliterated as ビーナス (bīnasu) instead of ヴィーナス (vīnasu). Japanese speakers, however, pronounce both the same, with [b] or [β], an occasional allophone of intervocalic /b/. [3]
In Japanese this is an important distinction in pronunciation; for example, compare さか, saka, "hill" with さっか, sakka, "author". However, it cannot be used to double an n – for this purpose, the singular n (ん) is added in front of the syllable, as in みんな ( minna , "all").
The moraic nasal /N/ is relatively common in Sino-Japanese, and contact with Middle Chinese is often described as being responsible for the presence of /N/ in Japanese (starting from approximately 800 AD in Early Middle Japanese), although /N/ also came to exist in native Japanese words as a result of sound changes. [7]
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.
Gairaigo (外来語, Japanese pronunciation: [ɡaiɾaiɡo]) is Japanese for "loan word", and indicates a transcription into Japanese.In particular, the word usually refers to a Japanese word of foreign origin that was not borrowed in ancient times from Old or Middle Chinese (especially Literary Chinese), but in modern times, primarily from English, Portuguese, Dutch, and modern Chinese ...
Kanji (漢字, pronounced ⓘ) are the logographic Chinese characters adapted from the Chinese script used in the writing of Japanese. [1] They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequently-derived syllabic scripts of hiragana and katakana.
The ellipsis was adopted into Japanese from European languages. The ellipsis is often three dots or six dots (in two groups of three dots), though variations in number of dots exist. The dots can be either on the baseline or centred between the baseline and the ascender when horizontal; the dots are centred horizontally when vertical. Other uses: