Dakuten Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Dakuten (濁点) and handakuten (半濁点) are diacritic signs used in the Japanese kana syllabaries to indicated that the consonant of a syllable should be pronounced voiced.
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2 Phonetic shifts 3 The V sound |
The dakuten resembles a quotation mark, while the handakuten is a small circle, both placed at the top right corner of a character:
Glyphs
The glyphs are identical in the hiragana and katakana scripts. The combining characters are rarely used, as Unicode and all common Japanese encodings provide precomposed glyphs for all possible dakuten and handakuten character combinations in the standard hiragana and katakana ranges.
Due to the similarity of the dakuten and the Western quotation mark ("), Japanese uses square quotes (「」) instead.
| none | dakuten | handakuten
|
|---|---|---|
| か ka | が ga
| |
| さ sa | ざ za
| |
| た ta | だ da
| |
| は ha | ば ba | ぱ pa
|
The V sound
In katakana only, the dakuten may also be added to the character ウ u and a small vowel character to create a /v/ sound, as in ヴァ va. As "V" 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 ビーナス biinasu instead of ヴィーナス viinasu. Many Japanese, however, would pronounce both the same, with a /b/ sound, and may or may not recognize them as representing the same word.
An even less common method is to add dakuten to the w- series, reviving the now defunct characters for /wi/ (ヰ) and /we/ (ヱ). /vu/ is represented by using /u/, as above; /wo/ becomes /vo/ despite its W normally being silent. Precomposed characters exist for this method as well (/va/ ヷ /vi/ ヸ /vu/ ヴ /ve/ ヹ /vo/ ヺ), although most IMEs do not have a convenient way to enter them.
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