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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.
Japanese is an agglutinative, mora-timed language with relatively simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topic–comment.
Japanese is an agglutinative, synthetic, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent.
The Japanese language makes use of a system of honorific speech, called keishō (敬称), which includes honorific suffixes and prefixes when talking to, or referring to others in a conversation. Suffixes are often gender-specific at the end of names, while prefixes are attached to the beginning of many nouns.
In some cases, Japanese coinages have subsequently been borrowed back into Chinese, such as 鮟鱇 (ankō, “monkfish”). The underlying word for jukujikun is a native Japanese word or foreign borrowing, which either does not have an existing kanji spelling (either kun'yomi or ateji) or for which a new kanji spelling is produced. Most often ...
The romanization of Japanese is the use of Latin script to write the Japanese language. [1] This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as rōmaji ( ローマ字 , lit. ' Roman letters ' , [ɾoːma(d)ʑi] ⓘ or [ɾoːmaꜜ(d)ʑi] ) .
Japanese punctuation marks are usually "full width" (that is, occupying an area that is the same as the surrounding characters). Punctuation was not widely used in Japanese writing until translations from European languages became common in the 19th century.
In earlier stages of Japanese, different realizations of the moraic nasal were actually indicated in writing. For example, during the Heian period (Early Middle Japanese), the "lingual nasal" was spelt differently when followed by a lingual consonant (/n, s/) compared to the "labial nasal" when followed by a labial consonant (/p, b, m/).