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vateso5074@lemmy.world 11 hours agoCouple minor nitpicks, just for the sake of knowledge sharing:
ち is usually pronounced “chi” instead of like “tee,” though is often written as “ti” in Kunrei romanization to be consistent with the other characters in its set. Hepburn romanization usually writes it as “chi” however, and is the more widespread (e.g. Sapporo Ichiban beer instead of “Itiban”; the protagonist of Spirited Away is named Chihiro instead of Tihiro, etc.)
It’s also called “katakana,” not “katanaga”. “Kana” is the term for syllabary (the consonant-vowel pair we see) and K is often voiced to G for compound terms. Hiragana means “even syllabary” because it could be written smoothly in a cursive-like format. Katakana is “fragmented syllabary” because its shapes derive more directly from pieces broken off from Chinese characters.
Katakana actually developed before hiragana, with hiragana being considered less refined (it was a “woman’s” script). But hiragana’s ease of writing helped it catch on as the default script over time, with katakana being reserved for words with emphasis. It’s commonly used for loanwords (but not universally so) because it’s similar to how “proper” English italicizes foreign terms that have not been totally subsumed into the vocabulary.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Lol thanks for the reminders with the corrections. Funny thing was I had started with S, then remembered shi, so switched to T. Should have done K instead. T also has tsu instead of tu, so even S would have been more correct than my “correction”.
I think I might have initially had katakana written down but second guessed (though I did initially misspell it again right here, so it was probably another one that started wrong and was corrected wrongly).
And yeah, the origin of hiragana has a story of overcoming oppression. From women not being allowed to use katakana to them just deciding to invent a new alphabet so they could write anyways, and apparently being better at it because that’s now the main alphabet, it’s like the hero’s journey.