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vateso5074@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

Couple 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.

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