All of these characters except VA ヷ, VI ヸ, VE ヹ, VO ヺ, and Katakana middle dot ・ are showing up in my browser. Anyone have any suggestions? --Koyaanis Qatsi
- (Originally I listed the incorrect characters above, and 63.192.137.xxx corrected them. Thanks. --Koyaanis Qatsi)
You should as well indicate the Operating system and Web browser you are using... -- HJH
The characters VA, VI, VE, VO are included in the Unicode standard but they are not in the "traditional" Katakana set. Apparently, they are new characters added to the Japanese language (any Japanese native to confirm this?), that may explain why the browser fails to display them until the fonts are updated with the new glyphs. On my IE 5.5, the missing characters are shown as dots, but they are different from the middle dot ・ character.
I'm sure it's a matter of having the right fonts installed. I can see them all correctly, but I have the entire set of Chinese Han ideographic fonts installed. These few characters may not be present in some limited Japanese font set. Either get a more complete Japanese font, or bite the bullet and install the whole CJK set. --LDC
Ok, thanks. I had something I thought was a font set up, but everytime I went into a browser it brought up a window asking which keyboard set I wanted, and after that got tiresome enough I uninstalled it through DOS, since Windows wouldn't cooperate about it. --Koyaanis Qatsi
This table is quite confusing. Index (name) should be on the left, and value (symbol) on the right. Or at least column pair should be better separated, like in bold. Is there any particular reason why it's reversed ? --Taw
I'd also like to see the table reorganized. In the traditional Japanese layout ( begins in the upper right with A, with five kana per column ( A E U E O in the first column, KA, KI KU KE KO in the second, etc. ) This format does naturally group the kana with the beginning consonant sound, which is very helpful. Note that I wouldn't want to see this format exactly, just noting some things which seem helpful about it. I also prefer the Hepburn ( SA SHI SU SE SO, TA CHI TSU TE TO) romanizations, but that's a style decision. -- Olof
The table goes from right to left and from top to bottom , just as Japanese is written. The syllables "va, vi, ve, vu" are not traditional. They have been added to accomodate the Japanese version of foreign words. In fact, the only one I remember seeing is "vi," in "whiskey."
- I don't understand this comment: In my browsers ( IE Mac OS 9 and IE Windows NT ) I see a table going from left to right. Furthemore, the contemporary kana representation of 'whiskey' is usually with U and small I : ウィスキー -- Olof
What are small KA and small KE use for ? --User:Taw
- Small KE is used in some place names, even though it is usually pronounced 'ga'. For example, Kasumigaseki is written 霞 ヶ 関, Ichigaya is 市 ヶ 谷
- Small KA is used in counting word combinations , i.e. to write ヵ月 to mean number of months or ヵ国 to mean number of countries. -- Olof
- FYI The counter prefix ka Japman 09:17, 22 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Recently some special characters have been added for transliteration of the Ainu language.
- So, uh, what are they? --Brion 17:34 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)
- Katakana Phonetic Extensions Japman 09:17, 22 Aug 2003 (UTC)
VA, VI, VE, and VO, as well as VU (ヴ), WI, and WE, are no more in use in Japanese (both hiragana and katakana). I believe they were dropped at the reform performed right after the World War II. Until that time katakana was used which every letters we now use hiragana for. -- Duckie
- Actually, the "U+small vowel kana" spelling for WI and WE (ウィ, ウェ), the "U with handakuten" spelling of VU (ヴ), and the "U with handakuten + small vowel kana" spelling for VA, VI, VE, and VO (ヴァ, ヴィ, ヴェ, ヴォ) are modern additions, used for foreign words. They shouldn't be confused with the stand-alone WI (ヰ) and WE (ヱ) kana, which are archaic. — Gwalla | Talk 22:11, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)
FYI Re: About ヴ Japman 09:17, 22 Aug 2003 (UTC)
uses of katakana
Beginning at some point in the mists of Japanese history, and lasting until some point in the 20th century (1945?--I'm not sure) katakana was used almost everywhere that hiragana is now--for okurigana, etc. I'm not sure about the history. Anyone have more specific information on this? I'd like to update this article to mention that.
- I want to say that this began in the Meiji era and ended during the Allied occupation. It seems to be associated with the Imperial rule... all the laws, edicts, and the like from 1868 - 1945 are written in kanji and katakana, but traditional literature was written in kanji and/or hiragana. - Sekicho 19:55, Aug 9, 2004 (UTC)
I concur with Sekicho. But I wonder why they did that. Is that because writing katakana is more efficient then hiragana? -- Taku 00:20, Aug 31, 2004 (UTC)
Question about katakana on another page
Hello. Are all of the katakana in the last section of this page currently in use? I'm trying to compile a complete chart of kana and since they're not mentioned here, I was curious. Thanks!
- There's some weird stuff on the page you reference (the "twa" and "kwa" lines, which I've never seen before, the "dexi" romanization for でぃ, which shows how to type the litte-e but is meaningless beyond that). I'd like to see some sightings of that stuff in the wild. BTW, you can sign your posts by typing for tildes in a row, like this (but without the spaces) ~ ~ ~ ~.adamrice 02:12, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- They repeated the main chart a lot. The only new ones they have is kw (qw is a bad romanization) and tw — and they're really only used to note silence in pronunciation, not actually form new words (e.g. クィーン [kwiin] instead of クイーン [kuiin]]). This can be done on all, so it's redundant listing these — and you should probably refer to wiki's chart, as they missed a few. --Blade Hirato 02:55, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Thanks, folks. One more, if you don't mind: What the heck are "dexyu" and "uxo" and the others? I tried a Google search and got almost nothing. I strongly suspect they're something nonstandard, but I've been wondering that for a while. Domo! -- J44xm 02:41, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)
- I have no idea! Fg2 03:33, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)
- Dexyu is デュ, pronounced dyu. Uxo is ウォ, wo (large u, small o, used because the kana "wo" is pronounced "o.") Sekicho 03:47, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)
- Sekicho, thanks for that information. Do you know where that romanization comes from? And whether it's actually in widespread use? I know the pronunciation, but I've never seen the letters "dexyu" before. I cannot imagine any speaker of English or any western European language saying dyu when they read the letters dexyu so I wonder who devised it. Fg2 03:53, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)
- That's how it would be typed into an input method editor. Since there's no "x" in Japanese, IME's interpret "x" to mean "make the next kana small." That's not how a sane person would romanize it. Sekicho