Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
A variant 乄 is used as well, to indicate that a letter is closed, as abbreviation of 閉め. The character originated as a cursive form of ト, the top component of 占 (as in 占める shimeru), and was then applied to other kanji of the same pronunciation. See ryakuji for similar abbreviations.
The list below shows the Japanese readings of letters in Katakana, for spelling out words, or in acronyms. For example, NHK is read enu-eichi-kē ( エヌ・エイチ・ケー ) . These are the standard names, based on the British English letter names (so Z is from zed , not zee ), but in specialized circumstances, names from other languages ...
This article should specify the language of its non-English content, using {{}}, {{transliteration}} for transliterated languages, and {{}} for phonetic transcriptions, with an appropriate ISO 639 code.
Letters in red are obsolete in modern Japanese. Even when he へ is used as a particle, it is written as he, not e (Kunrei-shiki/Hepburn). Even when ha は is used as a particle, it is written as ha, not wa. Even when wo を is used as a particle, it is written as wo, not o.
The charts below show the way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents Japanese language pronunciations in Wikipedia articles. For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters.
Scaled-down versions of the kana (ぁ, ァ) are used to express sounds foreign to the Japanese language, such as ファ (fa). In some Okinawan writing systems, a small ぁ is also combined with the kana く (ku) and ふ (fu or hu) to form the digraphs くぁ kwa and ふぁ hwa, although others use a small ゎ instead.
The first letters in such phrases give the ordering of the non-voiced initial sounds. For vowel ordering, the vowel sounds in the following English phrase may be used as a mnemonic: Ah, we soon get old. The vowel sounds in the English words approximate the Japanese vowels: a, i, u, e, o.