From: Tom Emerson (tree@basistech.com)
Date: Mon May 10 2004 - 14:27:33 CDT
Mike Ayers writes:
> You mean hiragana, not katakana, and kanji, not Han, I believe.
> Katakana are used for transliteration, and are not typically joined to
> kanji, whereas hiragana are ubiquitously joined to kanji, as Japanese
> particles do not ordinarily have kanji representation. I have not seen
> katakana joined to kanji (or romaji), and suspect that such does not occur.
We have observed that katakana is being used more and more in places
that you traditionally saw hiragana, especially in advertisements and
on the Web. Katakana is also being used as a way of emphasizing words
in a text, even those that would normally be written in hiragana. The
choice of script is becoming a stylistic issue lately and you are
seeing katakana in places you wouldn't expect them.
I also haven't seen katakana attached to kanji, though I have seen it
attached to romaji in constrained circumstances. It is very rare,
however.
I have seen hiragana attached to romaji, usually in the context of
particles attached to English nouns. You see the same thing (only more
so) in Korean, where an eojeol may contain mixed latin script and
hankul.
This may be all beside the point: people are probably not interested
in contemporary script usage in these contexts.
-tree
-- Tom Emerson Basis Technology Corp. Software Architect http://www.basistech.com "Beware the lollipop of mediocrity: lick it once and you suck forever"
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