Furigana is a Japanese reading aid consisting of smaller kana or syllabic characters printed either above or next to kanji or other characters to indicate their pronunciation. It is one type of ruby text. Furigana is also known as yomigana (読み仮名) and rubi in Japanese. In modern Japanese, it is usually used to gloss rare kanji, to clarify rare, nonstandard or ambiguous kanji readings, or in children's or learners' materials. Before the post-World War II script reforms, it was more widespread.
Katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script.
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 relation to the Japanese language and computers many adaptation issues arise, some unique to Japanese and others common to languages which have a very large number of characters. The number of characters needed in order to write in English is quite small, and thus it is possible to use only one byte (28=256 possible values) to encode each English character. However, the number of characters in Japanese is many more than 256 and thus cannot be encoded using a single byte - Japanese is thus encoded using two or more bytes, in a so-called "double byte" or "multi-byte" encoding. Problems that arise relate to transliteration and romanization, character encoding, and input of Japanese text.
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 sokuon is a Japanese symbol in the form of a small hiragana or katakana tsu. In less formal language it is called chiisai tsu (小さいつ) or chiisana tsu (小さなつ), meaning "small tsu". It serves multiple purposes in Japanese writing.
Japanese input methods are used to input Japanese characters on a computer.
The chōonpu, also known as chōonkigō (長音記号), onbiki (音引き), bōbiki (棒引き), or Katakana-Hiragana Prolonged Sound Mark by the Unicode Consortium, is a Japanese symbol that indicates a chōon, or a long vowel of two morae in length. Its form is a horizontal or vertical line in the center of the text with the width of one kanji or kana character. It is written horizontally in horizontal text and vertically in vertical text (
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.
ATOK is a Japanese input method editor (IME) produced by JustSystems, a Japanese software company.
ふ, in hiragana, or フ in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, each of which represents one mora. The hiragana is made in four strokes, while the katakana in one. It represents the phoneme, although for phonological reasons, the actual pronunciation is [ɸɯᵝ](listen), which is why it is romanized fu in Hepburn romanization instead of hu as in Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki rōmaji. Written with a dakuten, they both represent a "bu" sound, and written with handakuten they both represent a "pu" sound.
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.
Language input keys, which are usually found on Japanese and Korean keyboards, are keys designed to translate letters using an input method editor (IME). On non-Japanese or Korean keyboard layouts using an IME, these functions can usually be reproduced via hotkeys, though not always directly corresponding to the behavior of these keys.
The Japanese script reform is the attempt to correlate standard spoken Japanese with the written word, which began during the Meiji period. This issue is known in Japan as the kokugo kokuji mondai. The reforms led to the development of the modern Japanese written language, and explain the arguments for official policies used to determine the usage and teaching of kanji rarely used in Japan.
The romanization of Japanese is the use of Latin script to write the Japanese language. This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as rōmaji.
A keyboard layout is any specific physical, visual or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard, mobile phone, or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard.
Anthy is a package for an input method editor backend for Unix-like systems for the Japanese language. It can convert Hiragana to Kanji as per the language rules. As a preconversion stage, Latin characters (Romaji) can be used to input Hiragana. Anthy is commonly used with an input method framework such as ibus, fcitx or SCIM.
Several mutually incompatible versions of the Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) have been used to represent the Japanese language on computers, including variants defined by Hitachi, Fujitsu, IBM and others. Some are variable-width encodings, employing locking shift codes to switch between single-byte and double-byte modes. Unlike other EBCDIC locales, the lowercase basic Latin letters are often not preserved in their usual locations.
