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Katakana are often (but not always) used for transcription of Japanese company names. For example, Suzuki is written スズキ , and Toyota is written トヨタ . As these are common family names, Suzuki being the second most common in Japan, [ 8 ] using katakana helps distinguish company names from surnames in writing.
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.
Japanese names may be written in hiragana or katakana, the Japanese language syllabaries for words of Japanese or foreign origin, respectively. As such, names written in hiragana or katakana are phonetic rendering and lack meanings that are expressed by names written in the logographic kanji.
Today katakana is most commonly used to write words of foreign origin that do not have kanji representations, as well as foreign personal and place names. Katakana is also used to represent onomatopoeia and interjections, emphasis, technical and scientific terms, transcriptions of the Sino-Japanese readings of kanji, and some corporate branding.
In contemporary Japanese writing, foreign-language loanwords and foreign names are normally written in the katakana script, which is one component of the Japanese writing system. As far as possible, sounds in the source language are matched to the nearest sounds in the Japanese language, and the result is transcribed using standard katakana ...
In earlier stages of Japanese, different realizations of the moraic nasal were actually indicated in writing. For example, during the Heian period ( Early Middle Japanese ), the "lingual nasal" was spelt differently when followed by a lingual consonant ( /n, s/ ) compared to the "labial nasal" when followed by a labial consonant ( /p, b, m/ ).
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.
Unicode name HIRAGANA LETTER GE KATAKANA LETTER GE HIRAGANA LETTER BIDAKUON NGE [10] KATAKANA LETTER BIDAKUON NGE [10] CIRCLED KATAKANA KE Encodings decimal hex dec hex dec hex dec hex dec hex Unicode: 12370: U+3052: 12466: U+30B2: 12369 12442: U+3051+309A: 12465 12442: U+30B1+309A: 13016: U+32D8 UTF-8: 227 129 146: E3 81 92: 227 130 178: E3 82 ...