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Alternatively, on some keyboards, pressing the muhenkan (無変換, "no conversion") button switches between katakana and hiragana. Operation of a typical IME Sophisticated kana to kanji converters (known collectively as input method editors , or IMEs), allow conversion of multiple kana words into kanji at once, freeing the user from having to ...
Hiragana originated as simplified forms of similar-sounding Chinese characters. Hiragana character shapes were derived from Chinese cursive script (sōsho). Shown here is a sample of cursive script by 7th century calligrapher Sun Guoting. Note the character 為 (wei), indicated by the red arrow, closely resembles the hiragana character ゐ (wi).
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.
Hiragana consisting of detached elements are replaced by sequences of kana, Western letters, or symbols. For example, ho ( ほ ) may be typed as |ま ( vertical bar and hiragana ma ) or (ま (open parenthesis and ma ), ke ( け ) may be typed as レナ (katakana re na ), Iナ (capital i, na ), or († (open parenthesis, dagger ), and ta ( た ...
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.
The hiragana form of this kana is encoded into Unicode as HENTAIGANA LETTER I-1, with the position of U+1B006, while the katakana is encoded as KATAKANA LETTER ARCHAIC YI, in the position U+1B120. [7]
Each entry contains hiragana, katakana, and Hepburn romanization, in that order. † — The characters in red are historical characters and are obsolete in modern Japanese. [ 35 ] [ 36 ] In modern Hepburn romanization, they are often undefined.
Hiragana developed from man'yōgana written in the highly cursive sōsho (草書) style popularly used by women; meanwhile, katakana was developed by Buddhist monks as a form of shorthand, utilizing, in most cases, only fragments (for example, usually the first or last few strokes) of man'yōgana characters.