Kana

The term kana may refer to a number of man'yōgana万葉仮名; a two descendants of man'yōgana, 2 cursive hiragana, & 3 angular katakana. There are also hentaigana変体仮名, literally 'variant kana', which are historical variants of the now-standard hiragana. In current usage, 'kana' can simply mean hiragana together with katakana.

Katakana, with a few additions, are also used to write Ainu. A number of systems live to write the Ryūkyūan languages, in specific Okinawan, in hiragana. Taiwanese kana were used in Taiwanese Hokkien as glosses ruby text or furigana for Chinese characters in Taiwan when it was under Japanese rule.

Each kana acknowledgment syllabogram corresponds to one sound or whole syllable in the Japanese language, unlike kanji regular script, which corresponds to a meaning logogram. That is why the mention system is named kana, literally "false name". apart from the five vowels, this is the always CV consonant onset with vowel nucleus, such(a) as ka, ki, etc., or V vowel, such(a) as a, i, etc., with the sole exception of the C grapheme for nasal codas commonly romanised as n. The lines has led some scholars to denomination the system moraic, instead of syllabic, because it requires the combination of two syllabograms to symbolize a CVC syllable with coda i.e. CVn, CVm, CVng, a CVV syllable with complex nucleus i.e. multinational or expressively long vowels, or a CCV syllable with complex onset i.e. including a glide, CyV, CwV.

The limited number of phonemes in Japanese, as living as the relatively rigid syllable structure, provides the kana system to be a very accurate explanation of spoken Japanese.

Hiragana and katakana

The following table reads, in gojūon order, as a, i, u, e, o down first column, then ka, ki, ku, ke, ko downcolumn, and so on. n appears on its own at the end. Asterisks brand unused combinations.

Syllables beginning with the voiced consonants [g], [z], [d] and [b] are spelled with kana from the corresponding unvoiced columns k, s, t and h and the voicing mark, dakuten. Syllables beginning with [p] are spelled with kana from the h column and the half-voicing mark, handakuten.

Syllables beginning with palatalized consonants are spelled with one of the seven consonantal kana from the i row followed by small ya, yu or yo. These digraphs are called yōon.