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Japanese names 日本人の氏名 ... they received new names, which might contain a syllable or character from their lord's name as a mark of favor. [26]
A competing approach rejects the transcriptions /Q/ and /N/ and the identification of moraic consonants as their own phonemes, treating them instead as the syllable-final realizations of other consonant phonemes [48] (although some analysts prefer to avoid using the concept of syllables when discussing Japanese phonology [49]).
Katakana is now relegated to special uses such as recently borrowed words (i.e., since the 19th century), names in transliteration, the names of animals, in telegrams, and for emphasis. Originally, for all syllables there was more than one possible hiragana. In 1900, the system was simplified so each syllable had only one hiragana.
[12] [13] [14] Such words which use certain kanji to name a certain Japanese word solely for the purpose of representing the word's meaning regardless of the given kanji's on'yomi or kun'yomi, a.k.a. jukujikun, is not uncommon in Japanese. Other original names in Chinese texts include Yamatai country (邪馬台国), where a Queen Himiko lived.
Japanese words are spelled using characters that represent syllables (), rather than individual phonetic units as in the English alphabet.These characters are compiled into two syllabaries: hiragana and katakana.
Each kana character corresponds to one sound or whole syllable in the Japanese language, unlike kanji regular script, which corresponds to a meaning. Apart from the five vowels, it is always CV (consonant onset with vowel nucleus ), such as ka , ki , sa , shi , etc., with the sole exception of the C grapheme for nasal codas usually romanised as n .
The phonotactics of Japanese are relatively simple. The syllable structure is (C)(G)V(C), [42] that is, a core vowel surrounded by an optional onset consonant, a glide /j/ and either the first part of a geminate consonant (っ / ッ, represented as Q) or a moraic nasal in the coda (ん / ン, represented as N).
Technical and scientific terms, such as the names of animal and plant species and minerals, are also commonly written in katakana. [6] Homo sapiens, as a species, is written ヒト (hito), rather than its kanji 人. Katakana are often (but not always) used for transcription of Japanese company names.