Kana is a general term for two types of syllabic Japanese script: hiragana (ひらがな) and katakana (カタカナ). These were developed as an alternative and adjunct to ideograph based characters of Chinese origin, or Kanji (漢字).

Hiragana and katakana (grouped vertically). Syllables in parenthesis are archaic.

Modern usage

Today katakana is most commonly used to write words of foreign origin that do not have a kanji representation. For example, United States President George W. Bush can be expressed as ジョージ・W.・ブッシュ. Katakana is also used for sound effects, biological terms, and some corporate branding.

Hiragana is mostly used to indicate grammatical aspects of the language. It is also used to represent an entire word (usually of Japanese, rather than Chinese origin) in place of kanji.

Hiragana can be written in small form above or next to lesser-known kanji in order to show pronunciation; this is referred to as furigana. Furigana is used most widely in children's books; however, literature aimed for young children with little knowledge of kanji may dispense with it altogether and use hiragana combined with spaces instead.

History of kana

Development

Kana is traditionally said to have been invented by the Buddhist priest Kūkai in the 9th century. Kūkai certainly brought the Siddham script home on his return from China in 806; his interest in the sacred aspects of speech and writing led him to the conclusion that Japanese would be better represented by a phonetic alphabet than by the kanji which had been used up to that point.

The concept of phonetic characters existed before as Kanji phonetics known as Man'yōgana. Man'yōshū, a poetry anthology written in 759, is written in this early script.

Historical kana usage

Historical kana usage (歴史的仮名遣 rekishiteki kanazukai) refers to a system of spelling with kana that does not accord with modern Japanese pronunciation. It differs from modern usage in the number of characters and the way those characters are used. Historical kana were widely used until after World War II, but the modern system was adopted by Cabinet order in 1946.

Firstly, there are two more kana in historical usage, ゐ/ヰ (wi) and ゑ/ヱ (we). Today, these are pronounced as i and e, and words that formerly contained those characters are written with い and え.

Secondly, words are spelled differently. Historical kana usage actually represents the way these words were pronounced during the Heian era, when the spellings were formalized, but because of the pronunciation differences between modern Japanese and the language of 1,000 years past, there are a great number of peculiarities about historical spelling to the modern eye. This is similar to the situation that the great vowel shift caused in English spelling. Because these peculiarities followed fairly regular patterns, they weren't very difficult to learn.

Following are some typical examples showing the historical spelling, modern spelling, and kanji representation.

• けふ kefu → きょう kyō （今日）
• てふ tefu → ちょう chō （蝶）
• ゐる wiru → いる iru （居る）
• あはれ ahare → あわれ aware （哀れ）
• かへる kaheru → かえる kaeru （蛙）
• ゑびす webisu → えびす ebisu （夷）
• くゎし kwashi → かし kashi （菓子）

The table at the bottom gives a more complete list of the changes in spelling patterns.

Historical kana usage can be used to look up words in larger dictionaries and dictionaries specializing in old vocabulary, which are in print in Japan. One occasionally encounters old kana in words such as うゐすきい uwisukii ("whiskey", in hiragana).

Because of the great discrepancy between the pronunciation and spelling and the widespread adoption of modern kana usage, historical kana usage is almost never seen, except in some special cases; one notable case is restaurants that specialize in 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 signs. Again, companies, shrines and people occasionally use historical kana conventions such as ゑびす (Ebisu).

In addition, alternate kana letterforms, known as hentaigana (変体仮名), have nearly disappeared. A few uses remain, such as kisoba, often written using obsolete kana on the signs of soba shops.

The use of を (historically pronounced /wo/), へ, and は for sentence particles instead of お, え, and わ are remnants of historical kana usage.

Romanization of historical kana

Readers of English occasionally encounter words romanized according to historical kana usage, although we is typically rendered ye. Here are some examples, with modern romanizations in parentheses:

• Inouye (Inoue): a Japanese family name
• Tokugawa Iyeyasu (Ieyasu)
• Uyeno (Ueno): a place name
• Yedo (Edo): a former name of Tokyo
• Kwannon (Kannon): A Bodhisattva
• Kwansei Gakuin University (Kansai): A university in Kobe and Nishinomiya
• Iwo Jima (Iō-jima): An island known as the site of a battle during World War II

Spelling reform

As long ago as the Meiji Restoration, there had been dissatisfaction regarding the discrepancy between spelling and speech, but it was in 1946 immediately following World War II that modern kana usage was instituted as part of a general orthographic reform.

Kana in Unicode

The Hiragana range is U+3040 ... U+309F, and the Katakana range is U+30A0 ... U+30FF. The obsolete characters (WI and WE) also have their proper codepoints, except for hentaigana, as hentaigana are considered glyph variants of more common kana.

Code points U+3040, U+3097, and U+3098 are unassigned as of Unicode 4.0. Characters U+3095 and U+3096 are hiragana small ka and small ke, respectively. U+30F5 and U+30F6 are the katakana equivalents. Characters U+3099 and U+309A are combining dakuten and handakuten, which correspond to the spacing characters U+309B and U+309C. U+309D is the hiragana iteration mark, used to repeat a previous hiragana. U+309E is the voiced hiragana iteration mark, which stands in for the previous hiragana but with the consonant voiced (k becomes g, h becomes b, etc.). U+30FD and U+30FE are the kana iteration marks. 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.

There is also a small "Katakana Phonetic Extensions" range (U+31F0 ... U+31FF), which includes some extra characters for writing the Ainu language.

See also:

• Romaji
• Transliteration and Transcription
• Iroha Ordering of Kana as a poem

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