Talk:Kana

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[edit] My chart

My summary was mistaken: the chart came from hiragana, not katakana. — Gwalla | Talk 23:25, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Previous discussion of the merge of "Historical kana usage": Talk:Historical kana usage — Gwalla | Talk 23:29, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Discrepancy?

Was always taught that "Wi" and "We" really sound like "Yi" and "Ye" -- and I recall charts where these letters occur in the "ya" column. Can anyone confirm this?

no one spells the old name of tokyo "wedo" and "yido" sounds more like the way really old folks pronounce the word for water well.

Yes, I thought so too. As examples there are ヱビス and ヱン, typically romanized as Yebisu and Yen.
According to a Japanese Wikipedia article [1], the wi, we characters changed pronunciation to i, ye sometime during the 10-11th centuries (wi was never yi). Later, ye became e. In any case, the romanization should be in synch with how it's done in the hepburn page.
Basically, we and e were the same, both pronounced ye.

[edit] Names?

I'm not sure some of these historical kana names are actually historically spelled using the kana. In particular, Inouye should be "Yinouye" if it were faithful to the "historical" spelling; "Inouye" in that orthography appears only in the United States and is due to simplification of transliteration. "Iwo" also seems to be that way. There is also no "kw" kana in "historical" japanese.

That's only partially correct about "kw." There was no one kana for "kw." However, it was common (especially in Kyoto) to pronounce words with a "kw" and spell them with a ku - wa. Check Oku no Hosomichi, I recall seeing some in there. Of course, back in the olden days, they never made kana smaller, but it's essentially the same as the modern katakana ku - xa. Anyhow, even in Kyoto, the pronunciations had all shifted over to ka by the time spelling reform came, so the wa's were dropped and never seen again. --Carl 04:00, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)
In classical Japanese, several fairly common words used the "kwa" represented by ku - smallwa. Kwaji/kaji, wagwashi/wagashi. ryoukwan/ryoukan, suikwa/suika, gwaikoku/gaikoku, gakkwai/gakkai... there are dozens of kwa and gwa listed in the Koujien Dictionary. Here's a link to a Zuuzuu-ben (Touhoku dialect) page. At the end is a list of ka/kwa words it has retained while the sound scheme simplified in the rest of the not-so-isolated and more recently colonised areas of Japan.

About the ya-line e (ye), this website may be helpful, but only if you know enough Japanese. Otherwise, Jim Breen has a decent albeit very brief explanation of what happened to the "missing" kana. Essentially, there was never a kana for ye in any real sense of the term (perhaps only a katakana e to substitute), but was most commonly represented phonetically by at least one kanji. Perhaps the sound fell out of disuse or its consideration as one sound changed before it was assigned kana. But there was never any ya-line i sound (yi as in above "Yinouye"). Yi and wu are some of the hardest sounds to represent in Japanese whereas ye, wi, and we and even kwa are pretty easy.

It may also be noteworthy that some popular, modern usages of the wi and we are technically incorrect, but as the sounds no longer exist in Japan, they often go by unnoticed. For example, Yebisu beer is rendered Webisu in katakana. This spelling is not historically accurate and it drives Japanese teachers in Japan absolutely mad at times. Sorry to ramble! --JH 28 Dec 2004
Quick question: are you sure the wa in kwa was written small in the olden days? I'm sure it's written that way now when explaining about dialect differences and whatnot, but it's my understanding that before the reforms, small kana weren't really in use. For example, kyou was written with large ke and fu, though the fu was obviously just used to make a blended sound in later days. So, it wouldn't seem unusual to me to make a kwa sound using just the regular size when writing and not a special, smaller one. Or was "wa" just the one kana written small before the reforms? --Carl 06:38, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)
All the classical texts (for learners) that I've seen either use the small wa in left-to-right horizontal writing or else use the normal size wa in furigana in tate-gaki vertical writing. Perhaps this spelling convention is a modern revision. But if you look at classical tate-gaki furigana, nearly(?) all small kana are rendered in the normal size, as it seems they simply did not use small kana in furigana. This applies to ya-line kana (sho is rendered shi-yo, chou is rendered chi-yo-u). Perhaps this indicates elision of previously distinct syllables, or otherwise the innovation of small kana was not well developed/standardised at that point. But as long as the ku+wa=kwa, modern spelling conventions make the realisation of kwa more readily intelligible for the casual reader. I understand my place as an anon editor and as an amateur, and if you'd like to revert back to the big wa, I won't get bent out of shape in the least. --JH 28 Dec 2004

[edit] table of kana

Table of the Japanese kana
あア かカ さサ たタ なナ はハ まマ やヤ らラ わワ んン
a ka sa ta na ha ma ya ra wa n
いイ きキ しシ ちチ にニ ひヒ みミ りリ ゐヰ
i ki shi ti ni hi mi ri (wi)
うウ くク すス つツ ぬヌ ふフ むム ゆユ るル
u ku su tsu nu fu mu yu ru
えエ けケ せセ てテ ねネ へヘ めメ れレ ゑヱ
e ke se te ne he me re (we)
おオ こコ そソ とト のノ ほホ もモ よヨ ろロ をヲ
o ko so to no ho mo yo ro (w)o

Hmm I see Quadell has already replaced the image with this table. Perhaps it would be good to make a screen shot for those who's computers don't have japanese fonts.


Why there are no extended characters such as da, za, pa etc. which are present in Hiragana and Katakana articles? DmitryKo 11:03, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Old Spelling question

どじょう dojō (loach, a sardine-like fish), which often show the word in its historical spelling of どぜおう dozeō on their sign - if I understand correctly, shouldn't that be どぜう, dozeu? eu became jō, but I don't think eo changed to anything. And even if it had, there'd be a "missing" mora there.

[edit] Request

Please post more info/resources about modern kana - links to learning resources, examples of use etc. 90% of the article is sacrificed to historical kana and its comparisons to modern kana.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a how-to site. There's not really much more to be said about modern kana besides, "look at the table; memorize the characters; congratulations, you know the Japanese 'alphabet!' " We can't be expect to have a break down of the stroke order and mnemonic devices for each character in an encyclopedia, so the article naturally ended up being mostly history. I don't think that's necessarily bad. Then again, if someone wanted to write a guide to learning kana, I think Wikisource would be a good place to host it. --Carl 15:38, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)
A project like this already exists. See Wikibooks Japanese --ChrisRuvolo (t) 20:17, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Digraphs

Does anyone have more info on the ゟ and ヿ characters? It would be nice to have more info than just "U+309F is a ligature of "yori" (より) sometimes used in vertical writing. U+30FF is a ligature of "koto" (コト), also found in vertical writing". Proper usage, why are they in the Unicode table, how did the ligature ended up like that -- some pictures, perhaps?

I was the anonymous who wrote the above on August 2005. I'm still looking! Anyone?lampi 06:51, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Two systems

Why are there two Kana systems when already a single one would be enough? --Abdull 14:36, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

The article doesn't say anything about it, surprisingly. I haven't searched here, so maybe there's an article that covers it. My understanding is that there are two different systems because they're used for different purposes. Hiragana is used for Japanese words and grammatical purposes (particles, conjugation, inflection). Katakana is used for foreign words, onomatopoeia, and such. Having two separate systems probably makes text easier to read. All that said, I'm not really sure about the history: which system came first, when they decided they needed a second system, or anything like that. There's some discussion at manyogana, but it would be nice to see it expanded or clarified in this article, if anyone here would like to! —HorsePunchKid→龜 2005-11-27 01:00:32Z
The two different systems are now used for different purposes, but that's not why they both came about, and the current usages are not the way they've always been used. The two evolved on parallel tracks. This could be covered in a little more detail somewhere; it's discussed a little in the articles on hiragana and katakana. adamrice 17:47, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
I'd like to write some more about this topic but I'm not knowledgeable enough about this to start writing "off the top of my head" and at the moment I'm having a hard time finding good references. On the Japanese writing system Jim Breen added a lot of material based on Seeley's book, as referenced there. Does anyone have this book or another recommendation? It looks like a good place to start on writing the history of kana. --DannyWilde 02:35, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
I'll check out my copy of Halpern's kanji dictionary when I get home; it has quite a bit of information about the history of their various writing systems. (Wow, only $34 at Amazon! If you don't have a copy, I highly recommend it!) —HorsePunchKid→龜 2005-11-29 05:06:49Z

[edit] Picture

The infobox picture is ambiguous since it is chinese as well, meaning book. I suggest it be changed to a japanese word that is only in japanese and not in chinese. 70.111.251.203 03:23, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Two criticisms

Two criticisms of the page:

  1. Many readers will (like me) use it to transliterate a sequence of katakana, or more rarely hiragana. This is made harder by having both kinds of kana in the same table. Once I have established that what I am looking for is a katakana character, I would prefer to scan a table which only has katakana in it. So two separate tables would make things easier.
  2. The example, of the katakana for "George W. Bush", uses the character ジ which is not in the table.

I'm not going to change things myself because I don't actually know any Japanese. Maproom (talk) 12:36, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

I take your point, but the same paragraph that mentions how George Bush is written in Japanese mentions "See the article katakana for details." I don't know how many people will be using the kana article (or any article) as a tool for transliterating Japanese, and in any case, that's just one use for it. To my own mind, it's reasonable for the kana article to focus on what the different forms of kana have in common and how they differ. And if you've got Japanese text in electronic form, you might be better off using an online converter tool (see http://kanjidict.stc.cx/kakasifilt2.php ) adamrice (talk) 14:40, 17 December 2007 (UTC)