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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.
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").
し, in hiragana, or シ in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, which each represent one mora.Both represent the phonemes /si/, reflected in the Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki romanization si, although for phonological reasons, the actual pronunciation is ⓘ, which is reflected in the Hepburn romanization shi.
'Kana' is a compound of kari (仮, 'borrowed; assumed; false') and na (名, 'name'), which eventually collapsed into kanna and ultimately 'kana'. [2]Today it is generally assumed that 'kana' were considered "false" kanji due to their purely phonetic nature, as opposed to mana which were "true" kanji used for their meanings.
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 ...
In the Japanese language, the gojūon (五十音, Japanese pronunciation: [ɡo(d)ʑɯꜜːoɴ], lit. "fifty sounds") is a traditional system ordering kana characters by their component phonemes, roughly analogous to alphabetical order.
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A (hiragana: あ, katakana: ア) is a Japanese kana that represents the mora consisting of single vowel [a]. The hiragana character あ is based on the sōsho style of kanji 安, while the katakana ア is from the radical of kanji 阿. In the modern Japanese system of alphabetical order, it occupies the first position of the alphabet, before い.