 |
Modern kana usage (現代仮名遣い, gendai kanazukai) is the present official kanazukai (system of spelling the Japanese syllabary). Also known as new kana usage (新仮名遣い, shin kanazukai), it is derived from historical usage.
| |
Modern kana usage (現代仮名遣い, gendai kanazukai) is the present official kanazukai (system of spelling the Japanese syllabary). Also known as new kana usage (新仮名遣い, shin kanazukai), it is derived from historical usage.
As long ago as the Meiji Restoration, there had been dissatisfaction regarding the growing discrepancy between spelling and speech. On November 16, 1946, soon after World War II, the cabinet instituted the modern Japanese orthography as part of a general orthographic reform. The system was further amended in 1986.
There were no small kana in the pre-reform system; thus, for example, きよ would be ambiguous between kiyo and kyo while かつた could be either katsuta or katta.
The pronunciation of medial h-row kana as w-row kana in the pre-reform system does not extend to compound words; thus, にほん was pronounced nihon, not nion (via **niwon). There are a small number of counterexamples; e.g., あひる "duck", pronounced ahiru rather than airu, or ふぢはら, pronounced Fujiwara, despite being a compound of Fuji (wisteria) + hara (field). The h-row was historically pronounced as fa, fi, fu, fe, fo (and even further back, pa, pi, pu, pe, po). Japanese f (IPA: [ɸ] ) is close to a voiceless w, and so was easily changed to w in the middle of a word; the w was then dropped except for わwa. This is also why fu is used to this day and has not become hu.
The vowel + (f)u changes do not apply between elements of compound words, for example, the name てらうち was Terauchi not Terōchi, as it is Tera (temple) + uchi (inside, home). The -fu of the modern -u series of verbs (that is, those verbs using the actual kana う, such as kau or omou) was not affected by the sound changes on the surface; however, some reports of Edo era Japanese indicate that verbs like tamau and harau were pronounced as tamō and harō instead. In contrast, the -ō in darō and ikō is a product of the sound change from au to ō.
Furthermore, the topic particle wa(は), the direction particle e(へ) and the direct object particle o(を) were exempted from spelling reform. In contemporary Japanese, the を-character is used only for the particle.
Here, for example, あ (a) includes all kana using the /a/ vowel, such as か (ka) or た (ta).
| archaic | modern |
|---|---|
| あ＋う (a + u) あ＋ふ (a + fu) | おう (ō) |
| い＋う (i + u) い＋ふ (i + fu) | ゆう (yū) |
| う＋ふ (u + fu) | うう (ū) |
| え＋う (e + u) え＋ふ (e + fu) | よう (yō) |
| お＋ふ (o + fu) | おう (ō) |
| お＋ほ (o + ho) お＋を (o + wo) | おお (ō) |
| く＋わ (ku + wa) | か (ka) Originally kwa |
| ぐ＋わ (gu + wa) | が (ga) Originally gwa |
| medial or final は (ha) | わ (wa) |
| medial or final ひ (hi), へ (he), ほ (ho) | い (i), え (e), お (o) (via wi, we, wo, see below) |
| any ゐ (wi), ゑ (we), を (wo) | い (i), え (e), お (o) |
| ぢ (voiced chi), づ (voiced tsu) | じ (voiced shi), ず (voiced su) – see yotsugana |
Regarding じぢずづ – these four morae are distinguished or merged to varying degrees in different Japanese dialects, with some dialects (Tōhoku and Okinawan, for example) merging all four into one, while other dialects (Tosa and Satsugū, for example) distinguish among the four. Standard spelling reflects the pronunciation of standard Japanese, which merges these into two sounds.
Hiragana is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana as well as kanji.
Katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script.
Kana are syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or magana, which were Chinese characters (kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most prominent magana system being man'yōgana (万葉仮名); the two descendants of man'yōgana, (2) hiragana, and (3) katakana. There are also hentaigana, which are historical variants of the now-standard hiragana. In current usage, 'kana' can simply mean hiragana and katakana.
Hepburn romanization is the most widely used system of romanization for the Japanese language. The system was originally published in 1867 by James Curtis Hepburn, an American Christian missionary, as the standard in the first edition of his Japanese–English dictionary. The system is distinct from other romanization methods in its use of English orthography to phonetically transcribe sounds: for example, the syllable [ɕi] is written as shi and [tɕa] is written as cha, reflecting their spellings in English.
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. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is topic–comment. Its phrases are exclusively head-final and compound sentences are exclusively left-branching. Sentence-final particles are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or make questions. Nouns have no grammatical number or gender, and there are no articles. Verbs are conjugated, primarily for tense and voice, but not person. Japanese adjectives are also conjugated. Japanese has a complex system of honorifics with verb forms and vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned.
A phonemic orthography is an orthography in which the graphemes correspond to the phonemes of the language. Natural languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographies; a high degree of grapheme-phoneme correspondence can be expected in orthographies based on alphabetic writing systems, but they differ in how complete this correspondence is. English orthography, for example, is alphabetic but highly nonphonemic; it was once mostly phonemic during the Middle English stage, when the modern spellings originated, but spoken English changed rapidly while the orthography was much more stable, resulting in the modern nonphonemic situation. On the contrary the Albanian, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin, Romanian, Italian, Turkish, Spanish, Finnish, Czech, Latvian, Esperanto, Korean and Swahili orthographic systems come much closer to being consistent phonemic representations.
Nihon-shiki, is a romanization system for transliterating the Japanese language into the Latin alphabet. Among the major romanization systems for Japanese, it is the most regular one and has an almost one-to-one relation to the kana writing system.
The historicalkanaorthography, or old orthography, refers to the kana orthography in general use until orthographic reforms after World War II; the current orthography was adopted by Cabinet order in 1946. By that point the historical orthography was no longer in accord with Japanese pronunciation. It differs from modern usage in the number of characters and the way those characters are used. There was considerable opposition to the official adoption of the current orthography, on the grounds that the historical orthography conveys meanings better, and some writers continued to use it for many years after.
In the Japanese writing system, hentaigana are variant forms of hiragana.
Okurigana are kana suffixes following kanji stems in Japanese written words. They serve two purposes: to inflect adjectives and verbs, and to force a particular kanji to have a specific meaning and be read a certain way. For example, the plain verb form 見る inflects to past tense 見た, where 見 is the kanji stem, and る and た are okurigana, written in hiragana script. With very few exceptions, okurigana are only used for kun'yomi, not for on'yomi, as Chinese morphemes do not inflect in Japanese, and their pronunciation is inferred from context, since many are used as parts of compound words (kango).
Wāpuro rōmaji (ワープロローマ字), or kana spelling, is a style of romanization of Japanese originally devised for entering Japanese into word processors while using a Western QWERTY keyboard.
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 naturalised Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is considered to be one of the most complicated currently in use.
The classical Japanese language, also called "old writing", sometimes simply called "Medieval Japanese" is the literary form of the Japanese language that was the standard until the early Shōwa period (1926–1989). It is based on Early Middle Japanese, the language as spoken during the Heian period (794–1185), but exhibits some later influences. Its use started to decline during the late Meiji period (1868–1912) when novelists started writing their works in the spoken form. Eventually, the spoken style came into widespread use, including in major newspapers, but many official documents were still written in the old style. After the end of World War II, most documents switched to the spoken style, although the classical style continues to be used in traditional genres, such as haiku and waka. Old laws are also left in the classical style unless fully revised.
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 5×10 grid in which the characters are displayed. Each kana, which may be a hiragana or katakana character, corresponds to one sound in Japanese. As depicted at the right using hiragana characters, the sequence begins with あ (a), い (i), う (u), え (e), お (o), then continues with か (ka), き (ki), く (ku), け (ke), こ (ko), and so on and so forth for a total of ten rows of five columns.
Wi is a nearly-obsolete Japanese kana. The combination of a W-column kana letter with ゐ゙ in hiragana was introduced to represent [vi] in the 19th century and 20th century. It is presumed that 'ゐ' represented [wi](listen), and that 'ゐ' and 'い' represented distinct pronunciations before merging to some time between the Kamakura and Taishō periods. Along with the kana for we, this kana was deemed obsolete in Japanese with the orthographic reforms of 1946, to be replaced by 'い/イ' in all contexts. It is now rare in everyday usage; in onomatopoeia and foreign words, the katakana form 'ウィ' (U-[small-i]) is preferred.
Jōdai Tokushu Kanazukai is an archaic kana orthography system used to write Old Japanese during the Nara period. Its primary feature is to distinguish between two groups of syllables that later merged.
Kanazukai are the orthographic rules for spelling Japanese in kana. All phonographic systems attempt to account accurately the pronunciation in their spellings. However, pronunciation and accents change over time and phonemic distinctions are often lost. Various systems of kanazukai were introduced to deal with the disparity between the written and spoken versions of Japanese.
Early Middle Japanese is a stage of the Japanese language between 794 and 1185, which is known as the Heian period (平安時代). The successor to Old Japanese (上代日本語), it is also known as Late Old Japanese. However, the term "Early Middle Japanese" is preferred, as it is closer to Late Middle Japanese than to Old Japanese.
Yotsugana are a set of four specific kana, じ, ぢ, ず, づ, used in the Japanese writing system. They historically represented four distinct voiced morae (syllables) in the Japanese language. However, most dialects, such as Standard Japanese-speakers, have undergone mergers and now pronounce two sounds.
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 characters, each of which represents one syllable. For example, America is written アメリカ (A-me-ri-ka). To accommodate various foreign-language sounds not present in Japanese, a system of extended katakana has also developed to augment standard katakana.