Information About ®Dakuten |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT DAKUTEN | |
| kana | |
| japanese phonology | |
| japanese words and phrases | |
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In informal writing, particularly Manga , it is occasionally used on vowels to indicate a shocked or strangled articulation. GLYPHS The ''dakuten'' resembles a quotation mark, while the ''handakuten'' is a small circle, both placed at the top right corner of a ''kana'' character: :□゛ ''dakuten'' (゛) :□゜ ''handakuten'' (゜) The glyphs are identical in the Hiragana and Katakana scripts. The combining characters are rarely used in full-width Japanese characters, as Unicode and all common multibyte Japanese Encodings provide precomposed glyphs for all possible ''dakuten'' and ''handakuten'' character combinations in the standard ''hiragana'' and ''katakana'' ranges. However, combining characters are required in half-width katakana, which does not provide any precomposed characters in order to fit within a single byte. Due to the similarity of ''dakuten'' and Quotation Mark s ("), quotes in written Japanese often use Corner Brackets (「」) instead. PHONETIC SHIFTS The following table summarizes the phonetic shifts caused by the ''dakuten'' and ''handakuten''. Literally, syllables with dakuten are "muddy sounds" (濁音 ''dakuon''), while those without are "clear sounds" (清音 ''seion''), but the handakuten (lit. "half-muddy mark") does not follow this pattern. Handakuten on ''ka, ki, ku, ke, ko'' are not used in normal Japanese writing, but may be used by linguists and in dictionaries to represent the sound of ''ng'' in ''singing'' (.)'' See Hiragana for a complete table. Kana iteration marks The dakuten can also be added to Hiragana and Katakana Iteration Mark s, indicating that the previous Kana is repeated with voicing: Both signs are relatively rare, but can occasionally be found in personal names such as ''Misuzu'' (みすゞ). In these cases the pronunciation is identical to writing the kana out in full. There is also a longer mark called ''ku no jiten'', which is only used in Vertical Writing which repeats multiple kana, and this also can have a dakuten added. THE V SOUND In Katakana only, the dakuten may also be added to the character ウ ''u'' and a small vowel character to create a /v/ sound, as in ヴァ ''va''. As "V" does not exist in Japanese, this usage applies only to some modern loanwords and remains relatively uncommon, and e.g. Venus is typically transliterated as ビーナス ''biinasu'' instead of ヴィーナス ''viinasu''. Many Japanese, however, would pronounce both the same, with a /b/ sound, and may or may not recognize them as representing the same word. An even less common method is to add dakuten to the w- series, reviving the now defunct characters for /wi/ (ヰ) and /we/ (ヱ). /vu/ is represented by using /u/, as above; /wo/ becomes /vo/ despite its W normally being silent. Precomposed characters exist for this method as well (/va/ ヷ /vi/ ヸ /vu/ ヴ /ve/ ヹ /vo/ ヺ), although most IME s do not have a convenient way to enter them. MNEMONIC DEVICE It's much easier for non-native speakers to remember the phonetic shift through the use of a Mnemonic Device starting with the original sound and ending with the changed sound. An example would be:
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