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For non Japanese practicers who are curious: katakana is not used just for loan words. It is also used for some names, onomatopoeias, to make text stand out (th
by GuiA 10y ago
For non Japanese practicers who are curious: katakana is not used just for loan words. It is also used for some names, onomatopoeias, to make text stand out (the way we might use all caps/italics), some scientific terminology, etc.
- ekianjo 10y agoI was going to say that. Katakana is basically an emphasis marker more than anything else.
- vacri 10y agoI stand corrected - I only did Japanese in high school, and that's how we were taught. My mistake.
- wodenokoto 10y agoIf memory serves me right, it goes something like this: Katakana was developed to annotate Chinese script with readings and became an alphabet used by males. A secondary alphabet developed from cursive writing came to be as a script for women to write in. The tale of Genji is written entirely in hiragana, while contemporary male text would be written entirely using Chinese characters (kanji) Later we get this merging of the 3 alphabets, with katakana relegated to mostly being used in loan words. In a sense, it did originate to be used to describe foreign words.
- vorg 10y agoI read somewhere: "Katakana is Kanji written tiny; Hiragana is Kanji written quickly."
- taejo 10y agoEnglish can use italics for pretty much all of those things (foreign words, onomatopoeia, emphasis, scientific names of species...) so it's a pretty close match :)