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Japanese writing |
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Components |
Uses |
Transliteration |
kana gojūon | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Kana modifiers and marks | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Multi-moraic kana | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The sokuon (促音) is a Japanese symbol in the form of a small hiragana or katakana tsu. In less formal language, it is called chiisai tsu (小さいつ) or chiisana tsu (小さなつ), meaning "small tsu".[1] It serves multiple purposes in Japanese writing.
Appearance
[edit]In both hiragana and katakana, the sokuon appears as a tsu reduced in size:
Full-sized | Sokuon | |
---|---|---|
Hiragana | つ | っ |
Katakana | ツ | ッ |
Use in Japanese
[edit]The main use of the sokuon is to mark a geminate consonant,[1] which is represented in most romanization systems by the doubling of the consonant, except that Hepburn romanization writes a geminate ch as tch. It denotes the gemination of the initial consonant of the symbol that follows it.
Examples:
- Pocky, a Japanese snack food, is written in kana as ポッキー, which is
- ポ (po)
- ッ (sokuon)
- キ (ki)
- ー (chōonpu)
- 待って (matte), the te form of the verb 待つ (matsu, "wait"), is composed of:
- 待 (ma) (kanji)
- っ (sokuon)
- て (te)
- こっち (kotchi), meaning "here", is composed of:
- こ (ko)
- っ (sokuon)
- ち (chi)
The sokuon never appears at the beginning of a word or before a vowel (a, i, u, e, or o), and rarely appears before a syllable that begins with the consonants n, m, r, w, or y. (In words and loanwords that require geminating these consonants, ン (n), ム (mu), ル (ru), ウ (u), and イ (i) are usually used, respectively, instead of the sokuon.) In addition, it does not appear before voiced consonants (g, z, d, or b), or before h, except in loanwords, or distorted speech, or dialects. However, uncommon exceptions exist for stylistic reasons: For example, the Japanese name of the Pokémon species Cramorant is ウッウ, pronounced /uʔu/.[2]
The sokuon is also used at the end of a sentence, to indicate a glottal stop (IPA [ʔ], a sharp or cut-off articulation),[3] which may indicate angry or surprised speech. This pronunciation is also used for exceptions mentioned before (e.g., a sokuon before a vowel kana). There is no standard way of romanizing the sokuon that is at the end of a sentence. In English writing,[clarification needed] this is often rendered as an em dash. Other conventions are to render it as t or as an apostrophe.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the sokuon is transcribed with either a colon-like length mark or a doubled consonant:
- kite (来て, "come") – /kite/
- kitte (切手, "postage stamp") – /kitːe/ or /kitte/
- asari (あさり, "clams") – /asari/
- assari (あっさり, "easily") – /asːari/ or /assari/
The sokuon represents a mora, thus for example the word Nippon (Japan) consists of only two syllables, but four morae: ni-p-po-n.[4]
Use in other languages
[edit]In addition to Japanese, sokuon is used in Okinawan katakana orthographies. Ainu katakana uses a small ッ both for a final t-sound and to represent a sokuon (there is no ambiguity however, as gemination is allophonic with syllable-final t).
Computer input
[edit]There are several methods of entering the sokuon using a computer or word-processor, such as xtu
, ltu
, ltsu
, etc. Some systems, such as Kotoeri for macOS and the Microsoft IME, generate a sokuon if an applicable consonant letter is typed twice; for example tta
generates った.
Other representations
[edit]Preview | っ | ッ | ッ | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Unicode name | HIRAGANA LETTER SMALL TU | KATAKANA LETTER SMALL TU | HALFWIDTH KATAKANA LETTER SMALL TU | |||
Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex |
Unicode | 12387 | U+3063 | 12483 | U+30C3 | 65391 | U+FF6F |
UTF-8 | 227 129 163 | E3 81 A3 | 227 131 131 | E3 83 83 | 239 189 175 | EF BD AF |
GB 18030 | 164 195 | A4 C3 | 165 195 | A5 C3 | 132 49 151 49 | 84 31 97 31 |
Numeric character reference | っ |
っ |
ッ |
ッ |
ッ |
ッ |
Shift JIS[5] | 130 193 | 82 C1 | 131 98 | 83 62 | 175 | AF |
EUC-JP[6] | 164 195 | A4 C3 | 165 195 | A5 C3 | 142 175 | 8E AF |
EUC-KR[7] / UHC[8] | 170 195 | AA C3 | 171 195 | AB C3 | ||
Big5 (non-ETEN kana)[9] | 198 199 | C6 C7 | 199 91 | C7 5B | ||
Big5 (ETEN / HKSCS)[10] | 199 74 | C7 4A | 199 191 | C7 BF |
References
[edit]- ^ a b Kawahara, Shigeto. "The phonetics of obstruent geminates, sokuon" (PDF). Rutgers University. S2CID 145942. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-11-23.
- ^ The pronunciation is verifiable here: Nintendo Direct (September 5, 2019; 23 min 48 s). Retrieved 2019-09-05.
- ^ "What is that small tsu at the end of a sentence?". sljfaq.org. Retrieved 2019-06-28.
- ^ Nick Miller, Anja Lowit (2014). Motor Speech Disorders: A Cross-Language Perspective. Multilingual Matters. p. 223. ISBN 978-1-78309-232-1.
- ^ Unicode Consortium (2015-12-02) [1994-03-08]. "Shift-JIS to Unicode".
- ^ Unicode Consortium; IBM. "EUC-JP-2007". International Components for Unicode.
- ^ Unicode Consortium; IBM. "IBM-970". International Components for Unicode.
- ^ Steele, Shawn (2000). "cp949 to Unicode table". Microsoft / Unicode Consortium.
- ^ Unicode Consortium (2015-12-02) [1994-02-11]. "BIG5 to Unicode table (complete)".
- ^ van Kesteren, Anne. "big5". Encoding Standard. WHATWG.
- Fujihiko Kaneda, Rika Samidori (1989). Easy hiragana: first steps to reading and writing basic Japanese. Passport Books. pp. 74−78.
See also
[edit]- Japanese phonology gives a detailed description of the sound system of Japanese.
- Gemination