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Katakana (片仮名、カタカナ, IPA: [katakaꜜna, kataꜜkana]) is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, [2] kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived from components or fragments of more ...
Katakana also has variant forms, such as (ネ) and (ヰ). [7] However, katakana's variant forms are fewer than hiragana's. Katakana's choices of man'yōgana segments had stabilized early on and established – with few exceptions – an unambiguous phonemic orthography (one symbol per sound) long before the 1900 script regularization. [8]
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.
The katakana form is written similar to the Kangxi radical ... where the の can be read as both 之 zhī, the possessive marker, and as 汁 zhī, meaning "juice". [8
Like other vowels, scaled-down versions of the kana (ぃ, ィ) are used to express sounds foreign to the Japanese language, such as フィ (fi).In some Okinawan writing systems, a small ぃ is also combined with the kana く (ku) and ふ to form the digraphs くぃ kwi and ふぃ hwi respectively, although the Ryukyu University system uses the kana ゐ/ヰ instead.
Most of these novel katakana forms are digraphs, composed of standard katakana characters, but in digraph combinations not found in native words. For example, the word photo is transcribed as フォト (fo-to), where the novel digraph フォ (fo) is made up from フ (normally fu) plus a novel small combining form of オ (normally o).
In the Ainu language, the katakana ト can be written with a handakuten (which can be entered in a computer as either one character (ト゚) or two combined characters (ト゜) to represent the sound [tu], and is interchangeable with the katakana ツ゚.
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.