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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.
Most of the pairs have an almost similar pronunciation and vary significantly only in their duration. However, pairs a/á and e/é differ both in closedness and length. Italian: Indo-European: 30 + (1) 23 + (1) 7 [23] Japanese: Japonic: 20 + (9) 15 + (9) 5
For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters. Examples in the charts are Japanese words transliterated according to the Hepburn romanization system. See Japanese phonology for a more thorough discussion of the sounds of Japanese.
Technical and scientific terms, such as the names of animal and plant species and minerals, are also commonly written in katakana. [7] 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.
To alleviate any confusion on how to pronounce the names of other Japanese people, most official Japanese documents require Japanese to write their names in both kana and kanji. [32] Chinese place names and Chinese personal names appearing in Japanese texts, if spelled in kanji, are almost invariably read with on'yomi. Especially for older and ...
Many generalizations about Japanese pronunciation have exceptions if recent loanwords are taken into account. For example, the consonant [p] generally does not occur at the start of native (Yamato) or Chinese-derived (Sino-Japanese) words, but it occurs freely in this position in mimetic and foreign words. [2]
Man'yōgana (万葉仮名, Japanese pronunciation: [maɰ̃joꜜːɡana] or [maɰ̃joːɡana]) is an ancient writing system that uses Chinese characters to represent the Japanese language. It was the first known kana system to be developed as a means to represent the Japanese language phonetically. The date of the earliest usage of this type of ...
In the Japanese language, the gojūon (五十音, Japanese pronunciation: [ɡo(d)ʑɯꜜːoɴ], lit. "fifty sounds") is a traditional system ordering kana characters by their component phonemes, roughly analogous to alphabetical order. The "fifty" (gojū) in its name refers to the