handakuten

The , colloquially , is a diacritic most often used in the Japanese kana syllabaries to indicate that the consonant of a mora should be pronounced voiced, for instance, on sounds that have undergone rendaku (sequential voicing).

The , colloquially , is a diacritic used with kana for morae pronounced with or to indicate that they should instead be pronounced with .

Glyphs

The ''dakuten'' resembles a quotation mark, while the ''handakuten'' is a small circle, similar to a degree sign, both placed at the top right corner of a kana character:
*
*
*
*
*
*

Both the ''dakuten'' and ''handakuten'' glyphs are drawn identically in hiragana and katakana scripts. The combining characters are rarely used in full-width Japanese characters, as Unicode and all common multibyte Japanese encodings provide precomposed glyphs for all possible ''dakuten'' and ''handakuten'' character combinations in the standard hiragana and katakana ranges. However, combining characters are required in half-width kana, which does not provide any precomposed characters in order to fit within a single byte.

The similarity between the ''dakuten'' and quotation marks (") is not a problem, as written Japanese uses corner brackets (「」).

Phonetic shifts

The following table summarizes the phonetic shifts indicated by the ''dakuten'' and ''handakuten''. Literally, morae with ''dakuten'' are , while those without are . However, the ''handakuten'' (lit. "half-muddy mark") does not follow this pattern.

(Yellow shading indicates non-standard use.)

Handakuten on ''ka'', ''ki'', ''ku'', ''ke'', ''ko'' (rendered as ) represent the sound of ''ng'' in ''singing'' (), which is an allophone of in many dialects of Japanese. They are not used in normal Japanese writing, but may be used by linguists and in dictionaries (or to represent characters in fiction who speak that way). This is called ' . Another rare application of ''handakuten'' is on the ''r''-series, to mark them as explicitly ''l'': , and so forth. This is only done in technical or pedantic contexts, as many Japanese speakers cannot tell the difference between ''r'' and ''l''. Additionally, linguists sometimes use to represent in cases when speaker pronounces at the beginning of a word as a moraic nasal.

In katakana only, the ''dakuten'' may also be added to the character ''u'' and a small vowel character to create a sound, as in ヴァ ''va''. However, a hiragana version of this character also exists, with somewhat sporadic compatibility across platforms (). As does not exist in Japanese, this usage applies only to some modern loanwords and remains relatively uncommon, and e.g. Venus is typically transliterated as (''bīnasu'') instead of (''vīnasu''). Japanese speakers, however, pronounce both the same, with or , an occasional allophone of intervocalic .

An even less common method is to add ''dakuten'' to the ''w''-series, reviving the mostly obsolete characters for () and (). is represented by using /u/, as above; becomes despite its normally being silent. Precomposed characters exist for this method as well ( ), although most IMEs do not have a convenient way to enter them.

In Ainu texts, handakuten can be used with the katakana to make it a /t͡s/ sound, ''ce'' ͡se(which is interchangeable with ), and is used with small ''fu'' to represent a final ''p'', . In addition, handakuten can be combined with either katakana or (''tsu'' and ''to'') to make a u̜sound, or .

In Miyakoan, handakuten can be used with (normally to represent the vowel .

In informal writing, ''dakuten'' is occasionally used on vowels to indicate a shocked or strangled articulation; for example, on or . ''Dakuten'' can also be occasionally used with to indicate a guttural hum, growl, or similar sound.

Kana iteration marks

The ''dakuten'' can also be added to hiragana and katakana iteration marks, indicating that the previous kana is repeated with voicing:

Both signs are relatively rare, but can occasionally be found in personal names such as ''Misuzu'' () or brand names such as ''Isuzu'' (いすゞ). In these cases the pronunciation is identical to writing the kana out in full. A longer, multi-character iteration mark called the ''kunojiten'' (), only used in vertical writing, may also have a ''dakuten'' added ().

Other communicative representations

*Representations of Dakuten

*Representations of Handakuten

Voiced morae and semi-voiced morae do not have independent names in radiotelephony and are signified by the unvoiced name followed by "ni dakuten" or "ni handakuten".

* Full Braille representation

Origins

The ''kun'yomi'' pronunciation of the character (''daku'' in ''on'yomi'') is ''nigori''; hence the ''dakuten'' may also be called the ''nigori-ten''. This character, meaning "muddy", stems from historical Chinese phonology, where consonants were traditionally classified as "fully clear" (, voiceless unaspirated obstruent), "partly clear" (, voiceless aspirated obstruent), "fully muddy" (, voiced obstruent) and "partly muddy" (, voiced sonorant) (see Middle Chinese § Initials and w:zh:清濁音). Unlike in Chinese where "clear" and "muddy" were phonological, in Japanese, these terms are purely orthographic: a is simply a kana with a "muddy mark", or a ''dakuten''; a or is simply a kana with a "half muddy mark", or a ''handakuten''; a is any other kana without either of these marks. In fact, the "partly clear/half muddy" consonant in Japanese would be considered "fully clear" in Chinese, while "clear" Japanese consonants such as , , , and would be "partly muddy" in Chinese. Meiji-era descriptions of the Japanese "sound" system (either the actual phonology, or the orthography) in terms of "clear" and "muddy" always referenced the kana spelling and the two diacritics ''dakuten'' and ''handakuten''. There is a distinction between where a morpheme inherently contains a voiced consonant (as in the Sino-Japanese morpheme ), and where a morpheme loses its original voiceless consonant and gains a voiced counterpart through ''rendaku'' (as in → ).

The earliest attested use of "muddy" diacritics was from the late ninth century. One of such diacritics was a superscript version of the radical from the "muddy" character , as in (''ba'' rather than ''pa''). The modern ''dakuten'' appears to have come from Chinese tone diacritics. In some documents, one dot marked pitch on a "clear sound," while two dots marked pitch on a "muddy sound." Another source was the Siddhaṃ nasality diacritic anusvāra through Buddhist sources. In Japanese writing, it was adapted into a dot placed at the top-right corner of a character to denote the "muddiness" or nasality of consonants, as well as of the nasalized vowels and  adapted from the Chinese . The use of the anusvāra suggests prenasalization in early voiced consonants.

The ''handakuten'' is an innovation by Portuguese Jesuits, who first used it in the '' Rakuyōshū'', to accurately transcribe the consonant and its lenited form , which had not been distinguished in domestic writing.

See also

* Tsu (kana)
* Sokuon
* Dagesh (Hebrew diacritic)

References

Bibliography

*

External links

*
* and on Japanese Wikipedia


(Trans.: ''Phonetic Kana with Dakuten'') an

(Trans.: ''Phonetic Kana with Handakuten'')

{{Navbox diacritical marks

Kana
Japanese phonology
Japanese writing system terms
Diacritics