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Katakana (literal meaning: "fragmentary kana") is one of two
syllabifies used in Japanese writing along with Hiragana. These syllabifies
are used in conjunction with a set of ideograms called Kanji borrowed from
Chinese; and Romaji, the Roman alphabet. As with the English alphabet, the
katakana are used for transliteration, a method to represent one language in
the alphabet of another. The other main use of katakana is onomatopoeia, the
use of words to imitate sounds. The form of katakana is characterized by
squarish lines and is the simplest of any of the Japanese scripts.
Katakana is most frequently used to represent foreign words and names.
For example, Osama Bin Laden can be written in Japanese using Katakana like
オサマ ビン ラディン
An example of the onomatopoeia use is ハー, which means sigh because the
sound is similar to the sound when you sigh.
Katakana was developed by students who used a part of man'yogana
characters as shorthand when writing down words whose proper Chinese
characters were unknown. Thus, カ (ka) comes from the left side of 加 (ka).
While used to represent words borrowed from foreign languages,
katakana is often limited in its ability to represent them as they sound in
the language in question. This is due to the syllabic nature of the phonemes
of Japanese. This is of no concern to the Japanese, who prefer pronouncing
foreign concepts in their own way anyway. For example, to pronounce
"McDonald's" the name of a popular fast food chain, you would say "ma ku do
na ru do". Many English words pronounced in katakana are indecipherable to
native English speakers.
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