Japanese letters
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Japanese novel using kanji kana majiri bun (text with both kanji and kana), the most general orthography for modern Japanese. Ruby characters (or furigana) are also used for kanji words (in modern publications these would generally be omitted for well-known kanji). The text is in the traditional tategaki ("vertical writing") style; it is read down the columns and from right to left, like traditional Chinese. Published in 1908.
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| Languages | Japanese language |
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Time period
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4th century AD to present |
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Parent systems
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| Direction | Varies |
| ISO 15924 | Jpan, 413 |
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U+4E00–U+9FBF Kanji U+3040–U+309F Hiragana U+30A0–U+30FF Katakana |
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When written vertically, the writing system is top to bottom, and right to left. When written horizontally, the writing system is most often left to right, similar to standard English text. In the early to mid-1900s, there were infrequent cases of horizontal text being written right to left, but that style is very rarely seen in modern Japanese writing.
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The modern Japanese writing system is a combination of two character types: logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalised Japanese words and grammatical elements, and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is often considered to be the most complicated in use anywhere in the world.
Several thousand kanji characters are in regular use. Each has an intrinsic meaning (or range of meanings), and most have more than one pronunciation, the choice of which depends on context. Japanese primary and secondary school students are required to learn 2,136 jōyō kanji as of 2010. The total number of kanji is well over 50,000, though few if any native speakers know anywhere near this number.
In modern Japanese, the hiragana and katakana syllabaries each contain 46 basic characters, or 71 including diacritics. With one or two minor exceptions, each different sound in the Japanese language (that is, each different syllable, strictly each mora) corresponds to one character in each syllabary. Unlike kanji, these characters intrinsically represent sounds only; they convey meaning only as part of words. Hiragana and katakana characters also originally derive from Chinese characters, but have been simplified and modified to such an extent that their origins are no longer visually obvious. The principle of the syllabic script itself is thought to have been borrowed from the Indian Sanskritic Siddham script.
Texts without kanji are rare; most are either children's books—since children tend to know few kanji at an early age—and early electronics such as computers, phones, and videogames, which could not display complex graphemes like kanji due to both graphical and technological limitations.
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Wikipedia