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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.
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.
For example, in standard Japanese the kana おう can be pronounced in two different ways: as /oː/ meaning "king" (王), [2] and as /oɯ/ meaning "to chase" (追う). [3] Kunrei and Hepburn spell the two differently as ô / ō and ou , because the former is a long vowel while the latter has an o that happens to be followed by a u ; however ...
The earliest Japanese romanization system was based on Portuguese orthography.It was developed c. 1548 by a Japanese Catholic named Anjirō. [2] [citation needed] Jesuit priests used the system in a series of printed Catholic books so that missionaries could preach and teach their converts without learning to read Japanese orthography.
In addition to native words and placenames, kanji are used to write Japanese family names and most Japanese given names. Centuries ago, hiragana and katakana , the two kana syllabaries, derived their shapes from particular kanji pronounced in the same way.
Different linguists analyze the Japanese inventory of consonant phonemes in significantly different ways: [11] for example, Smith (1980) recognizes only 12 underlying consonants (/m p b n t d s dz r k ɡ h/), [12] whereas Okada (1999) recognizes 16, equivalent to Smith's 12 plus the following 4 (/j w ts ɴ/), [13] and Vance (2008) recognizes 21 ...
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The official Japanese-language name is Nippon-koku or Nihon-koku (日本国), literally "State of Japan". [18] As an adjective, the term "Dai-Nippon" remains popular with Japanese governmental, commercial, or social organizations whose reach extend beyond Japan's geographic borders (e.g., Dai Nippon Printing, Dai Nippon Butoku Kai, etc.).