History of Katakana
While hiragana was developed from cursive Man’yougana, katakana was developed from the angled, sharp noncursive version of Man’yougana ("Japanese Hiragana"). In the ninth century, priests used the kana syllabary dedicated for male use to translate Chinese literature into Japanese complete with inflections that were particular to Japanese language ("Japanese Katakana"). In the fourteenth century, katakana became much more organized, with one-to-one correlations between sound and character as seen in hiragana ("Japanese Katakana"). Although katakana and kanji were the default writing systems used by men in power, katakana eventually became dedicated to re-appropriating foreign words into the Japanese lexicon while hiragana became the writing system that represented words of Japanese origin. By the 20th century, katakana was purely used to denote lexical borrowing, names, onomatopoeia, and emphasis ("Japanese Katakana").
While hiragana was developed from cursive Man’yougana, katakana was developed from the angled, sharp noncursive version of Man’yougana ("Japanese Hiragana"). In the ninth century, priests used the kana syllabary dedicated for male use to translate Chinese literature into Japanese complete with inflections that were particular to Japanese language ("Japanese Katakana"). In the fourteenth century, katakana became much more organized, with one-to-one correlations between sound and character as seen in hiragana ("Japanese Katakana"). Although katakana and kanji were the default writing systems used by men in power, katakana eventually became dedicated to re-appropriating foreign words into the Japanese lexicon while hiragana became the writing system that represented words of Japanese origin. By the 20th century, katakana was purely used to denote lexical borrowing, names, onomatopoeia, and emphasis ("Japanese Katakana").
The interesting thing about katakana is that there are several characters the system shares with the Korean writing system Hangeul, although hiragana does not. This is because Hangeul and the kana writing systems were both derived from variants of Chinese hanzi (“kanji” in Japan and “hanja” in Korea) (“Korean”). The Korean kingdoms and Japanese territories were consistently interacting when either place wasn’t practicing isolationism. The development of Hangeul was an alternative to the archaic Chinese writing system in place, just as hiragana and katakana became an alternative in Japan. Although both katakana and Hangeul share similar characters, they do not share the same sounds, and Hangeul’s construction differs quite a bit from the kana syllabaries. For example:
“ス” in Japanese is “su” while in Korean “ス” is representative of “j”.
“ス” in Japanese is “su” while in Korean “ス” is representative of “j”.
Function
Katakana has the exact same sounds as hiragana does, with simply different characters. There are 46 basic characters, and many of the same rules in hiragana apply to katakana as well. Instead of vowel elongation using an additional vowel character, katakana makes use of a “ー” after the initial sound. The handakuten work the same way hiragana does.
Katakana is used for names, onomatopoeia, emphasis, and lexical borrowing as seen below:
Katakana has the exact same sounds as hiragana does, with simply different characters. There are 46 basic characters, and many of the same rules in hiragana apply to katakana as well. Instead of vowel elongation using an additional vowel character, katakana makes use of a “ー” after the initial sound. The handakuten work the same way hiragana does.
Katakana is used for names, onomatopoeia, emphasis, and lexical borrowing as seen below:
The use of katakana to lexically borrow is based on phonetics. The foreign word is parsed into CV or V phonemes (as the writing system compensates for) that are pronounceable and understandable through katakana to Japanese speakers but still sound akin to the original word. An example: