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'Kana' is a compound of kari (仮, 'borrowed; assumed; false') and na (名, 'name'), which eventually collapsed into kanna and ultimately 'kana'. [3]Today it is generally assumed that 'kana' were considered "false" kanji due to their purely phonetic nature, as opposed to mana which were "true" kanji used for their meanings.
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.
こ, in hiragana or コ in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, each of which represents one mora.Both represent IPA:.The shape of these kana comes from the kanji 己.. This character may be supplemented by a dakuten; it becomes ご in hiragana, ゴ in katakana and go in Hepburn romanization.
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 ...
Geminate consonants in native Japanese words were formed either by the elision of a long vowel, as in 真赤な (makka-na "bright red"; once まあかな, maaka-na), or by some random process, as in 屹度 (kitto "surely"; once きと, kito); such words are written with the full-size つ (tu) in historical kana. [2] In general, a Japanese on ...
In the Japanese writing system kana ligatures (Japanese: 合略仮名, Hepburn: gōryaku-gana) are ligatures in the kana writing system, both hiragana and katakana. Kana such as koto ( ヿ , from 事) and shite ( 𬼀 , from 為) are not kana ligatures, but polysyllabic kana .
Like every other hiragana, the hiragana の developed from man'yōgana, kanji used for phonetic purposes, written in the highly cursive, flowing grass script style. In the picture on the left, the top shows the kanji 乃 written in the kaisho style, and the centre image is the same kanji written in the sōsho style.
ゑ in hiragana, or ヱ in katakana, is an obsolete Japanese kana that is normally pronounced [e] in current-day Japanese. The combination of a W-column kana letter with "ゑ゙" in hiragana was introduced to represent [ve] in the 19th and 20th centuries. [citation needed]