katakana

katakana, one of the two sets of syllabic Japanese script. Katakana is used to write scientific terms, official documents, and words borrowed from other languages. The other set, hiragana, is used to write native Japanese words in regular settings. The word katakana combines the words kata (“fragmentary”) and kana (“syllabary”).

Click Here to see full-size tableThe Japanese language can be written with three different scripts: kanji, hiragana, and katakana. Kanji, which is the oldest of the three scripts, consists of Chinese ideograms (hanzi) that were introduced in Japan in the 5th century ce. But the kanji system is very complicated, consisting of tens of thousands of characters that can be combined to create additional words. Just reading a newspaper requires knowledge of some 2,000 kanji.

Hiragana and katakana, the syllabic (kana) scripts, developed over time out of linguistic necessity. Japanese differs in substantial ways from Chinese, which lacks characters that coincide with Japanese grammatical particles like wa, ga, and ni. To account for that tension, Japanese scholars experimented with adaptations to Chinese writing that conformed in various ways and degrees to the Japanese language. One such adaptation was man’yōgana, a phonetic syllabary that came into use in the 8th century. This system used Chinese characters whose Chinese pronunciation sounded similar to Japanese syllables, rather than using the ideas that the characters represented. In the 9th century man’yōgana was simplified, giving rise to the two syllabic sets, hiragana and katakana. People who received literacy training first learned the more flowing hiragana writing. Those who continued their education to become scribes or court writers then learned the more squared katakana, which was used for official documents and religious texts. Notes in hiragana are found on the back sides of official documents, suggesting that katakana was considered more formal than hiragana.

The katakana syllabary contains the vowels a, i, u, e, and o and 14 phonemic consonants: k, s, t, n, h, m, y, r, w, g, z, d, b, and p. These consonants generally pair with each of the vowels in the syllabary, although y pairs only with a, u, and o, and w pairs only with a and o. The consonant n is the only consonant that has a syllabic symbol on its own without a vowel. Like hiragana, katakana can represent the five types of Japanese syllables: a lone vowel, an initial consonant + a vowel, a single consonant, a double consonant, or a consonant + y + a vowel.

Borrowings from other languages are transcribed in katakana according to their sounds, although transcriptions follow the rules of Japanese syllabification: syllables must end in a vowel, an n, or a geminate consonant. Often, borrowed words contain a syllable that requires an added vowel, such as the u vowels in bōrupen (ball[point] pen) and aisukurīmu (ice cream).