Kana
Kana
Katakana, with a few additions, are also used to write Ainu. A number of systems exist to write the Ryūkyūan languages, in particular Okinawan, in hiragana. Taiwanese kana were used in Taiwanese Hokkien as ruby text for Chinese characters in Taiwan when it was under Japanese rule.
Kana
Each kana character corresponds to one phoneme or syllable, unlike kanji, which generally each corresponds to a morpheme. Apart from the five vowels, it is always CV (consonant onset with vowel nucleus), such as ka, ki, sa, shi, etc., with the sole exception of the C grapheme for nasal codas usually romanised as n. The structure has led some scholars to label the system moraic), instead of syllabic, because it requires the combination of two syllabograms to represent a CVC syllable with coda (e.g. CVn, CVm, CVng), a CVV syllable with complex nucleus (i.e. multiple or expressively long vowels), or a CCV syllable with complex onset (i.e. including a glide, CyV, CwV).
Kana
The limited number of phonemes in Japanese, as well as the relatively rigid syllable structure, makes the kana system a very accurate representation of spoken Japanese.
Reading List
Report Issue