Japan writes ice cream, robot voices and even its own species in katakana
Japanese uses several scripts at once, and katakana plays a role a bit like italics in English. It spells borrowed foreign words, sound effects, species names and company brands such as Toyota. Its angular characters began as fragments of Chinese characters, clipped by Buddhist monks glossing Chinese texts.
The name means fragmentary kana, a nod to those origins. Katakana and its rounded sibling hiragana are both syllabaries: each character stands for a vowel, a consonant plus vowel, or the lone nasal n, which can sound like English m, n or ng depending on its neighbours. The full set has 48 characters, traditionally arranged in a grid called the fifty sounds, whose vowel and consonant order was inherited from Sanskrit scholarship. Only 46 remain in modern use, since wi and we merged into plain vowels long ago, and the character for wo survives almost solely as a grammatical particle usually written in hiragana.
Small marks do a lot of work. A double dot, the dakuten, voices a consonant, turning ka into ga, and a small circle turns ha into pa; these marks existed for a millennium but became mandatory only in the late twentieth century. A shrunken tsu doubles the next consonant, the difference between saka, hill, and sakka, author. Loanwords get a special dash that lengthens a vowel, so English mail becomes meru with a stretched e, and tiny vowel characters create sounds Japanese lacks, as in family or the first syllable of Wikipedia.
In daily life, katakana marks the foreign: aisukurimu for ice cream, Amerika for the United States, and ramen, which is rarely written any other way. It also tags doorbell chimes, the scientific name for humans, and brands like Suzuki, distinguishing the carmaker from Japan's second most common surname. Manga artists use it to make a foreigner or a robot sound stilted.
Its history is surprisingly practical. Official documents before the Second World War mixed katakana with kanji, telegrams used it until 1988, and 1980s computers printed it before multibyte text arrived. Many elderly women still carry katakana given names.
Source: Katakana
