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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. The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived from components or fragments of more complex kanji. Katakana and hiragana are both kana systems. With one or two minor exceptions, each syllable in the Japanese language is represented by one character or kana in each system. Each kana represents either a vowel such as "a" ; a consonant followed by a vowel such as "ka" ; or "n", a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English m, n or ng or like the nasal vowels of Portuguese or Galician.
The term kana may refer to a number of 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.
In the Japanese writing system, hentaigana are variant forms of hiragana.
の, in hiragana, and ノ, in katakana, are Japanese kana, both representing one mora. In the gojūon system of ordering of Japanese syllables, it occupies the 25th position, between ね (ne) and は (ha). It occupies the 26th position in the iroha ordering. Both represent the sound. It is highly similar in form to the Kangxi radical 丿, radical 4.
A is a Japanese kana that represents the mora consisting of single vowel. The hiragana character あ is based on the sōsho style of kanji 安, while the katakana ア is from the radical of kanji 阿. In the modern Japanese system of alphabetical order, it occupies the first position of the alphabet, before い. Additionally, it is the 36th letter in Iroha, after て, before さ. The Unicode for あ is U+3042, and the Unicode for ア is U+30A2.
JIS X 0201, a Japanese Industrial Standard developed in 1969, was the first Japanese electronic character set to become widely used. It is either a 7-bit encoding or an 8-bit encoding, although the 8-bit form is dominant for modern use. The full name of this standard is 7-bit and 8-bit coded character sets for information interchange (7ビット及び8ビットの情報交換用符号化文字集合).
U is one of the Japanese kana, each of which represents one mora. In the modern Japanese system of alphabetical order, they occupy the third place in the modern Gojūon (五十音) system of collating kana. In the Iroha, they occupied the 24th position, between む and ゐ. In the Gojūon chart, う lies in the first column and the third row. Both represent the sound. In the Ainu language, the small katakana ゥ represents a diphthong, and is written as w in the Latin alphabet.
Half-width kana are katakana characters displayed compressed at half their normal width, instead of the usual square (1:1) aspect ratio. For example, the usual (full-width) form of the katakana ka is カ while the half-width form is ｶ. Half-width hiragana is not included in Unicode, although it's usable on Web or in e-books via CSS's font-feature-settings: "hwid" 1 with Adobe-Japan1-6 based OpenType fonts. Half-width kanji is not usable on modern computers, but is used in some receipt printers, electric bulletin board and old computers.
In the Unicode standard, a plane is a continuous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecimal format (U+hhhhhh). Plane 0 is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), which contains most commonly used characters. The higher planes 1 through 16 are called "supplementary planes". The last code point in Unicode is the last code point in plane 16, U+10FFFF. As of Unicode version 15.0, five of the planes have assigned code points (characters), and seven are named.
Latin Extended-A is a Unicode block and is the third block of the Unicode standard. It encodes Latin letters from the Latin ISO character sets other than Latin-1 and also legacy characters from the ISO 6937 standard.
Katakana is a Unicode block containing katakana characters for the Japanese and Ainu languages.
Kana Supplement is a Unicode block containing one archaic katakana character and 255 hentaigana characters. Additional hentaigana characters are encoded in the Kana Extended-A block.
Enclosed Ideographic Supplement is a Unicode block containing forms of characters and words from Chinese, Japanese and Korean enclosed within or stylised as squares, brackets, or circles. It contains three such characters containing one or more kana, and many containing CJK ideographs. Many of its characters were added for compatibility with the Japanese ARIB STD-B24 standard. Six symbols from Chinese folk religion were added in Unicode version 10.
Kana Extended-A is a Unicode block containing hentaigana and historic kana characters. Additional hentaigana characters are encoded in the Kana Supplement block.
Small Kana Extension is a Unicode block containing additional small variants for the Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries, in addition to those in the Hiragana, Katakana and Katakana Phonetic Extensions blocks.
Wu is a hentaigana, a variant kana or Japanese syllable.
Ye is a hentaigana, a variant kana or Japanese syllable, no longer in standard use.
Kana Extended-B is a Unicode block containing kana originally created by Japanese linguists to write Taiwanese Hokkien known as Taiwanese kana.
References
- ↑ "Unicode character database". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2016-07-09.
- ↑ "Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2016-07-09.