Dakuten

Dakuten (濁点), colloquially ten-ten ("dot dot"), is a diacritic used in the Japanese kana syllabary to indicate that the consonant of a syllable is pronounced sonorous.

Handakuten (半濁点), colloquially maru ("circle"), is a diacritic used in characters of the Japanese kana syllabary that, in In the Hepburn Romanization system, they are transliterated beginning with h. It modifies the phonetics of the character by pronouncing it as [p].

Graphic

The dakuten looks like quotation marks, while the handakuten is a small circle, both positioned in the upper right corner of a kana character:

dakuten

handakuten

The symbols are identical in hiragana and katakana scripts. The character combination is rarely used, but Unicode and all common Japanese character encoding systems provide signs for all possible dakuten and handakuten character combinations.

Due to the similarity between dakuten (◌゙) and quotation marks ("), written Japanese often uses square quotation marks (「」) instead, but in some dialogue such as comic balloons the dakuten is used as a quotation mark.

Phonetic changes

The following table summarizes the phonetic changes caused by dakuten and handakuten. Literally, syllables with dakuten are "muddy sounds" (濁音 dakuon) and those without it are "clear sounds" (清音 seion), but handakuten (lit. "semi-muddy mark") does not follow this pattern.

See also:

• Hiragana (for a complete table).

Kana iteration flags

The dakuten can also be added to the hiragana and katakana iteration marks, to denote that the previous kana is repeated audibly.

Both signs are relatively rare, but are sometimes found in personal names, such as Misuzu (みすゞ), Suzuho (すゞほ), or Suzuka (すゞか). In these cases the pronunciation is identical to if it were written completely in kana.

The V-sound

In katakana only, the dakuten can also be added to the character ウ u and a small vowel character to create a /v/ sound, as in ヴァ va. Since /v/ does not exist in Japanese, this usage is only for modern loanwords and is relatively rare. For example, Venus is often transliterated as ビーナス biinasu instead of ヴィーナス viinasu. However, many Japanese would pronounce both words the same, with a /b/ sound, and may or may not recognize them as the same word.

An even rarer method is to add dakuten to the w- series, reviving the missing characters for /wi/ (ヰ) and /we/ (ヱ). /vu/ is represented using /u/ as seen above; /wo/ becomes /vo/ even though W is normally silent. There are also characters for this method (/va/ ヷ /vi/ ヸ /vu/ ヴ /ve/ ヹ /vo/ ヺ), although most computer character input systems do not have a convenient system. for them.