3 ms·
Dakuten(what you call “dots over letters”) are used to modify the way consonants are pronounced, not for emphasis, e.g to turn the character for “Ka”(カ) into “G
by alphonsegaston 9y ago
Dakuten(what you call “dots over letters”) are used to modify the way consonants are pronounced, not for emphasis, e.g to turn the character for “Ka”(カ) into “Ga”(ガ).
And the usage of katakana in the way the parent describes isn’t “tiring.” It follows almost the exact same pattern as words are italicized in English, where a word or phrase is represented differently from the surrounding text. Less common/standardized, but not tiring.
EDIT:
My bad on the bouten/dakuten confusion. Apologies.
- chch 9y agoI believe GP is talking about boten/wakiten, not dakuten :) https://r12a.github.io/scripts/tutorial/images/misc.png https://r12a.github.io/scripts/tutorial/images/misc.png
- cooper12 9y agoI think they're referring to bōten or wakiten: https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/1737/22682 https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/1737/22682
- fenomas 9y agoGP was talking about 圏点/傍点, not dakuten. Their point about katakana was also correct - normally a word is either written in katakana or it isn't, regardless of emphasis. Using katakana for emphasis happens but it's not common, and would get tiresome very quickly.
- xelxebar 9y agoAs @chch mentions, the parent probably meant bouten/etc. I couldn't find an English article on it, but the Japanese Wikipedia page has examples and some cool CSS styling info that's related: https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/圏点 https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/圏点 As for katakana, it really does depend. For common or short words, people usually don't have a problem, but if you throw a whole katakana sentence at a Japanese person they will often stumble and reading speed noticably decreases.