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Katakana are often (but not always) used for transcription of Japanese company names. For example, Suzuki is written スズキ , and Toyota is written トヨタ . As these are common family names, Suzuki being the second most common in Japan, [ 8 ] using katakana helps distinguish company names from surnames in writing.
Japanese names may be written in hiragana or katakana, the Japanese language syllabaries for words of Japanese or foreign origin, respectively. As such, names written in hiragana or katakana are phonetic rendering and lack meanings that are expressed by names written in the logographic kanji.
Today katakana is most commonly used to write words of foreign origin that do not have kanji representations, as well as foreign personal and place names. Katakana is also used to represent onomatopoeia and interjections, emphasis, technical and scientific terms, transcriptions of the Sino-Japanese readings of kanji, and some corporate branding.
There are a small number of municipalities in Japan whose names are written in hiragana or katakana, together known as kana, rather than kanji as is traditional for Japanese place names. [1] Many city names written in kana have kanji equivalents that are either phonetic manyōgana, or whose kanji are outside of the jōyō kanji.
In contemporary Japanese writing, foreign-language loanwords and foreign names are normally written in the katakana script, which is one component of the Japanese writing system. As far as possible, sounds in the source language are matched to the nearest sounds in the Japanese language, and the result is transcribed using standard katakana ...
Hikaru (ひかる, ヒカル) is a Japanese unisex given name meaning "light" or "radiance". [1] [2] [3] ... The name can also be written in hiragana or katakana. It ...
The katakana form has become increasingly popular as an emoticon in the Western world due to its resemblance to a smiling face. This character may be combined with a dakuten, forming じ in hiragana, ジ in katakana, and ji in Hepburn romanization; the pronunciation becomes /zi/ (phonetically [d͡ʑi] or [ʑi] in the middle of words).
It is, however, more common to use ディ instead, such as ディオン to translate the name Dion. In the Ainu language, チ by itself is pronounced [t͡s], and can be combined with the katakana ヤ, ユ, エ, and ヨ to write the other [t͡s] sounds. The combination チェ (pronounced [t͡se]), is interchangeable with セ゚.