Monday, January 27, 2020

words - Do all kana have a large and small reading?


Kana are written in large and small versions with different pronunciations in the composition of words but I am not able to determine if all kana can be used in this way. Thank you.



Answer



There are no such things as "lowercase" katakana in Japanese. If you mean as opposed to , and such, please call them small katakana. I assume you mean this.


Not all katakana have small versions. Here is the full list of small katakana characters defined in the Japanese character set.


ァ ィ ゥ ェ ォ
ヵ ㇰ ヶ ㇱ ㇲ ッ ㇳ
ㇴ ㇵ ㇶ ㇷ ㇷ゚ ㇸ ㇹ ㇺ
ャ ュ ョ ㇻ ㇼ ㇽ ㇾ ㇿ ヮ


Very common ones are ャ ュ ョ ッ. I think you already know how to use these. If not, consult the easiest textbook you have.


The character is also common but has a different usage from others (see this). is for the same purpose, but much rarer.


ァ ィ ゥ ェ ォ ヮ are relatively less common, but you will find them often used to approximate foreign sounds or old Japanese sounds (eg. ドゥ, フェ, グヮ).


The others are very rare special katakana used to write Ainu words (see: Special katakana for the Ainu language) and sometimes Korean words. You can safely forget them.


There are of course small hiragana, too. But the number is much smaller because we don't use hiragana to represent foreign words.


ぁ ぃ ぅ ぇ ぉ っ ゃ ゅ ょ ゎ

These small vowels are mainly used to represent long vowels in native Japanese words (see this).


No comments:

Post a Comment

digital communications - Understanding the Matched Filter

I have a question about matched filtering. Does the matched filter maximise the SNR at the moment of decision only? As far as I understand, ...