KaNa
Kana (仮名, Japanese pronunciation: [kana]) are the syllabaries that form parts of the Japanese writing system, contrasted with the logographic Chinese characters known in Japan as kanji (漢字). The modern Japanese writing system makes use of two syllabaries: cursive hiragana (ひらがな) and angular katakana (カタカナ). Also classified as kana is the ancient syllabic use of kanji known as man'yōgana (万葉仮名), which was ancestral to both hiragana and katakana. Hentaigana (変体仮名, "variant kana") are historical variants of modern standard hiragana. In modern Japanese, hiragana and katakana have directly corresponding sets of characters representing the same series of sounds.
Katakana, with a few additions, are also used to write Ainu.
Taiwanese kana were used in Taiwanese Hokkien as glosses (furigana) for Chinese characters in Taiwan under Japanese rule.
Each kana character (syllabogram) corresponds to one sound in the Japanese language. Apart from the five vowels, this is always CV (consonant onset with vowel nucleus), such as ka, ki, etc., or V (vowel), such as a, i, etc., with the sole exception of the C grapheme for nasal codas usually romanised as n. This structure has led some scholars to label the system moraic instead of syllabic, because it requires the combination of two syllabograms to represent a CVC syllable with coda (i.e. CVn, CVm, CVng), a CVV syllable with complex nucleus (i.e. multiple or expressively long vowels), or a CCV syllable with complex onset (i.e. including a glide, CyV, CwV).
Due to the limited number of phonemes in Japanese, as well as the relatively rigid syllable structure, the kana system is a very accurate representation of spoken Japanese.
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