Talk:Katakana
All of these characters except VA ヷ, VI ヸ, VE ヹ, VO ヺ, and Katakana middle dot ・ are showing up in my browser. Anyone have any suggestions? --KQ
- (Originally I listed the incorrect characters above, and 63.192.137.xxx corrected them. Thanks. --Koyaanis Qatsi)
You should as well indicate the Operating system and Web browser you are using... -- HJH
The characters VA, VI, VE, VO are included in the Unicode standard but they are not in the "traditional" Katakana set. Apparently, they are new characters added to the Japanese language (any Japanese native to confirm this?), that may explain why the browser fails to display them until the fonts are updated with the new glyphs. On my IE 5.5, the missing characters are shown as dots, but they are different from the middle dot ・ character.
I'm sure it's a matter of having the right fonts installed. I can see them all correctly, but I have the entire set of Chinese Han ideographic fonts installed. These few characters may not be present in some limited Japanese font set. Either get a more complete Japanese font, or bite the bullet and install the whole CJK set. --LDC
Ok, thanks. I had something I thought was a font set up, but everytime I went into a browser it brought up a window asking which keyboard set I wanted, and after that got tiresome enough I uninstalled it through DOS, since Windows wouldn't cooperate about it. --KQ
This table is quite confusing. Index (name) should be on the left, and value (symbol) on the right. Or at least column pair should be better separated, like in bold. Is there any particular reason why it's reversed ? --Taw
I'd also like to see the table reorganized. In the traditional Japanese layout ( begins in the upper right with A, with five kana per column ( A E U E O in the first column, KA, KI KU KE KO in the second, etc. ) This format does naturally group the kana with the beginning consonant sound, which is very helpful. Note that I wouldn't want to see this format exactly, just noting some things which seem helpful about it. I also prefer the Hepburn ( SA SHI SU SE SO, TA CHI TSU TE TO) romanizations, but that's a style decision. -- Olof
The table goes from right to left and from top to bottom , just as Japanese is written. The syllables "va, vi, ve, vu" are not traditional. They have been added to accomodate the Japanese version of foreign words. In fact, the only one I remember seeing is "vi," in "whiskey."
I don't understand this comment: In my browsers ( IE Mac OS 9 and IE Windows NT ) I see a table going from left to right. Furthemore, the contemporary kana representation of 'whiskey' is usually with U and small I : ウィスキー -- Olof
What are small KA and small KE use for ? --Taw
Small KE is used in some place names, even though it is usually pronounced 'ga'. For example, Kasumigaseki is written 霞 ヶ 関, Ichigaya is 市 ヶ 谷
Small KA is used in counting word combinations , i.e. to write ヵ月 to mean number of months or ヵ国 to mean number of countries. -- Olof