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When more than one historical spelling is given for a particular modern spelling, the various historical spellings were etymologically (and at one point phonetically) distinct and occurred in different words (i.e. in most cases, they are not merely different ways to spell the same word). The tables are sorted using the gojūon ordering system.
Other uses of letters include abbreviations of spellings of words. Here are some examples: E: 良い /いい (ii; the word for "good" in Japanese). The letter appears in the name of the company e-homes. J: The first letter of "Japan" (日本) as in J1 League, J-Phone. Q: The kanji 九 きゅう ("nine") has the reading kyū.
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 ...
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.
Abbreviations are common in Japanese; these include many Latin alphabet letter combinations, generally pronounced as initialisms.Some of these combinations are common in English, but others are unique to Japan or of Japanese origin, and form a kind of wasei eigo (Japanese-coined English).
For example, the Japanese word for "to do" (する suru) is written with two hiragana: す (su) + る (ru). Katakana are generally used to write loanwords , foreign names and onomatopoeia . For example, retasu was borrowed from the English "lettuce", and is written with three katakana: レ ( re ) + タ ( ta ) + ス ( su ).
The Japanese language has many homophones, and conversion of a kana spelling (representing the pronunciation) into a kanji (representing the standard written form of the word) is often a one-to-many process. The kana to kanji converter offers a list of candidate kanji writings for the input kana, and the user may use the space bar or arrow keys ...
The usual Japanese word for "encyclopedia" is hyakka jiten (百科事典 "100/many subject dictionary", see Japanese encyclopedias). The jiten, jisho, and jibiki terms for dictionaries of kanji "Chinese characters" share the element ji (字 "character; graph; letter; script; writing").